THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
written by William Shakespeare
adapted & directed by Igor Golyak
for Arlekin Theatre Company
at the Classic Stage Company Theatre
Reviewed by David Spencer
I suppose it’s not unknown for an experimental company to be hit-and-miss, but after what has to be characterized the triumph of Our Class, which returned a season later for an encore engagement, the Arlekin’s take on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has to be characterized…um, well…a surprise.
Strictly speaking, it’s director-adapter Igor Golyak’s take, which he has subtitled “a comedy, performed nightly for a live audience,” which in a nutshell describes the problem.
Because the character of Shylock is such a hotpoint, due to the play’s implicit antisemitism—despite Shakespeare’s artful humanization of the Jewish villain—the play has come to be performed primarily as a drama, with an ending both happy and unsettling, which of course was never the Bard’s intent. What’s most unsettling is that the play was originally intended as a comedy. That said, it’s not beyond the pale for a director to want to look at it through that lens. I’m Jewish and I myself have always wondered what it might be like to spin it in the manner of, say, a three-camera sitcom of the MTM variety; to let the dark values take care of themselves and see if the light actually has some situational laughs that can exist alongside the inescapable social issues. Okay, “a comedy,” Shakespeare’s own designation, fair enough.
But then there’s “performed nightly for a live audience.” That’s not Shakespeare. And we know theatre is performed for live audiences, so it can’t mean to tell us something that self-evident. It has to be making the distinction between live performance and recorded performance. Which means we’re in the land of anachronism before we start. Uh-oh.
Sure enough, the framing device is a talk show. There’s the host-emcee making introductions and getting tangled in props, then introducing as guests characters from the play and because the text makes that conceit unsustainable, the talk-show format quickly falls apart and becomes a between-scene punctuation to a melee of stuff that was clearly arrived at during rehearsals in which wild improvisation was encouraged. Hand puppets, disco dances, songs, acrobatics, poor Richard Topol in the title role, made to don and remove plastic glasses attached to a long, plastic, “Jewish” long nose—indicating that Shylock’s sometimes “into” his villainy, sometimes unable to hide his misery at being an outcast (wink-wink, get it? get it?)…and it doesn’t take long for the random circus to become a classic, ‘70s-style train wreck.
What makes comedy funny is the way it speaks to our own, or at least recognizably human, foibles, and the common thread through its many styles is that, to be effective, it has to be played for real stakes; put another way, you have to believe in the urgency of the storytelling universe. By framing the play in a talk show, Golyak starts out with an artificial construct…and by further overloading it with loud, exaggerated business of the LOOK! LOOK HOW FUNNY WE’RE BEING variety…well, you get the idea. Bit after bit falls dead.
What’s lost is therefore not just the comedy, but the play itself. And the point of the exercise. And if the current website data is accurate, they’ve also “lost” the intermission.
No surprise there…