Merchant of Venice

William Shakespeare

Date			06-10-1994
Venue			Harrogate Theatre
Company			Harrogate Theatre Company
Cast Members
Shylock			Damian Myerscough
Antonio			Derrick gilbert
Salerio; Nerissa			Kacey Ainsworth
Bassanio			Roger May
Salanio			Mark Olknow
Lorenzo			John Owen-Jones
Portia			Sarah Coomes
Gratiano			Stephanie Woodcraft
Lancelot Gobo; Others			Paul Panting
Jessica			Charlotte Copeland
The Guards			Robert Glyn-Jones: Liz Wilson; Ian Turner; Lisa Golding; Nic Wistreich; Bekah Fozard (all are members of Harrogate Theatre's Youth Theatre Workshop)
My Comments			There was something I did't like about this, but I still found it fascinating. The gist of the plot is that concentration camp prisoners rehearse the play in the first half. The second half is part of their perfomance, full costume and all. The shock ending is when Shylock is shot by a guard - seated in one of the theatre's boxes - just as it looks as though he is about to triumph in the court scene.
This is a comment taken from the programme. I think that Andrew Manley - the Director - may have written it. How accurate. I wish all Dirctors would read it before tackling Shakespeare. 'One thing we can be sure of: Shakespeare was not a secret twentieth-century liberal, animated by programmatic opposition to racial prejudice. (If he had been, he would have done better not to have written The Merchant of Venice at all)...He was writing an Elizabethan comedy in which Shylock is meant to be a villain. He is also a Jewish villain', writes John Gross in his book Shylock. So should we try to make this deeply anti-Semitic (and racist) play acceptable to our times? Should we try to clean up Shakespeare, as numerous productions have attempted to do, particularly since the Holocaust? Or should we try to see the play as Shakespeare intended it, as a Christian comedy fairy-tale? Whilst acknowledging that the world has changed? Whatever we do, we shouldn't try to make the unacceptable side of Shakespeare acceptable. We shouldn't try to explain away the fact that Shakespeare held and propagated unpleasant ideas that, because of his fame, have seriously damaged the cause of understanding over nearly 400 years. The Merchant of Venice was much performed in Nazi Germany, including a famous production ordered by the Nazi Governor of Vienna and starring the most famous Jewish Shylock of the time, Werner Krauss. Whilst music, theatre and performance flourished and were self-generated in the Nazi-created ghettos, they were produced on instructions in the camps, with a full orchestra in Auschwitz and theatre or variety shows in many camps for the Nazi rulers.