Merchant and Jew at the Royal Shakespeare Company

In the program essay for his company’s production of The Merchant of Venice, Royal Shakespeare Company Artistic Director Gregory Doran asserted that the RSC had taken Venice as the starting point for their repertoire that season, a perplexing claim insofar as only half of the six plays on offer ( Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Volpone) featured scenes in the City of Bridges. Simultaneously, he declared that the season examined the outsider, someone “forced to stand outside society by others, because of their race, sexuality or religion.” Given his exclusion of class and gender, only Merchant, Othello, and The Jew of Maltamet the criteria, and two of the season’s dramas—Miller’s Death of a Salesmanand Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice—were excluded entirely from either proposed theme. The verbiage struggled to conceal a minor controversy as the RSC broke the tradition of performing Shakespeare on his birthday and substituted a month of pure Miller as a star-vehicle for Doran’s partner Antony Sher.

Famously, Doran and Sher met whilst performing in Bill Alexander’s 1987 RSC Merchant(see Jacques). Cast as Solanio, the young Doran spat on and brutalized his soon-to-be-partner’s Shylock in a revival famed for historically accurate design and viciously anti-Semitic action. Sher brought additional authenticity by stressing his Jewish heritage in interviews. Though many actors have essayed Shylock for the RSC in intervening years, it took 2015’s Makram J. Khoury to up the authenticity ante. A past winner of the Israel Prize, the state’s highest civic honor, Khoury was pointedly identified in the program as a “Palestinian-Israeli.” It is surprising, then, that a production that often followed Alexander’s and cast so resonantly and specifically (Khoury played just one role in the season) avoided exploiting the actor’s offstage persona in overt onstage design and characterization. While Shylock differed sartorially from the rest of a company stylishly and timelessly attired by Anette Guther, the distinction appeared a function of age rather than religion; in what seemed a high school envisioned by a perfume ad art director, Khoury’s grandfatherly figure sported an outdated Members Only jacket and sweater vest in lieu of a tallit katan or kippah (he did don traditional headgear for the trial). Visually, it was difficult to discern “which [wa]s the merchant here, and which the Jew” (4.1.169), but from an auditory standpoint Khoury’s presumably natural accent marked his Shylock as distinctly “other” and also, sadly, unintelligible. While one welcomes vocal alongside other diversities on the classical stage, Khoury was frustratingly difficult to understand, and as a result his character struggled to achieve definition.

The problem was exacerbated by Jamie Ballard’s distinctive Antonio. Just as an...