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Reviewed by:
  • The Merchant of Veniceperformed by Royal Shakespeare Company
  • Jami Rogers
The Merchant of VenicePresented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. 05 1309 262011. Directed by Rupert Goold. Designed by Tom Scutt. Lighting by Rick Fisher. Sound by Gregory Clarke. Music by Bruce O’Neill. With Jamie Beamish (Launcelot Gobbo), Howard Charles (Gratiano), Susannah Fielding (Portia), Scott Handy (Antonio), Chris Jarman (Prince of Morocco), Aidan Kelly (Solanio), Caroline Martin (Jessica), Des McAleer (Duke of Venice, Old Gobbo), Jason Morell (Prince of Aragon, Servant), Daniel Percival (Lorenzo), Emily Plumtree (Nerissa), Richard Riddell (Bassanio), Patrick Stewart (Shylock), Christopher Wright (Tubal) , and others.

Rupert Goold’s 2011 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Merchant of Venicewas a controversial rendering of the play with a Las Vegas casino setting and a cast that adopted a range of American accents. Plaudits and criticism ranged from Quentin Letts in the reactionary Daily Mail(20 May 2011) predictably calling it a “terrible production” to Kate Bassett in the Independent on Sunday(22 May 2011) finding it to be “audacious and inspired.” Many reviewers commented on one feature that had been inspired by the decision to resituate Venice to the US’s gambling capital: the transformation of Launcelot Gobbo (Jamie Beamish) into an Elvis impersonator. Printed responses to this aspect of the production included both disparaging and light-hearted takes on Goold’s interjection of twentieth-century music into the action; Letts’s remarks dripped with sarcasm, while Libby Purves in The Times(23 May 2011) declared that Beamish would “work his way determinedly through [Elvis’s] back catalogue.”

In The Independent(24 May 2011), Paul Taylor noted that this Elvis motif provided an “ironic counterpoint throughout” the action, but arguably his evaluation underestimated the carefully constructed use of music within the production. What has been overlooked in much of the commentary on Goold’s Merchantthus far is, as Kevin Ewert notes, how theater appropriates cinematic conventions to produce an audio track that foregrounds “synchronized descriptive music that reproduces, [End Page 733]explains and underlines every major moment in order to enhance the audiences’ emotional response” (“The Thrust Stage Is Not Some Direct Link to Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Bulletin29.2: 170). Far from being a superficial or unnecessary element, Rupert Goold’s use of Elvis Presley material—along with other music choices—was designed to calibrate audience’s collective response to this Merchant’s events as they played out in big town America. As I will illustrate, by using music cinematically within the production Goold provided a shift in the emotional tone of the piece that guided the audience’s response and highlighted the production’s emotional realism.

In using the term “emotional realism,” I am attempting to define a nebulous concept that comes from the individual and collective process that is acting within the context of creating performance but is also deeply individual in creation and response. Both joy and pain are transmitted to individual members of the audience by their recognition of the “truth” of the emotion played (and often experienced) by the actor in performance. What follows, then, is my subjective recognition of the emotional “truth” or “realism”—and the manipulation of emotion through music—within Goold’s version of The Merchant of Venice.

The production’s music was placed within a specific, naturalistic context. Goold and his designer (Tom Scutt) introduced their Las Vegas setting through an elaborately choreographed and extratextual pre-show that established the society in which this version of Merchant of Venicetook place. The house opened with Salerio (Steve Toussaint) as a croupier dealing cards and Antonio (Scott Handy) as his customer playing blackjack. This sequence began approximately fifteen minutes before the first lines of Shakespeare’s text were spoken; in the intervening time, the stage gradually filled with activity. An opulent Las Vegas casino hotel—complete with betting tables, waitresses, slot machines, bar staff, bouncers, punters taking photographs, and country tourists overwhelmed by the experience—was being reenacted on the newly redesigned thrust stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

The climax of this pre-show was a scene of frenetic energy as music blared and...

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