"A brooding, powerful production…Throughout the director Jonathan Munby’s lucid and strongly acted staging, we will remain aware that while this Shakespearean play is classified as a comedy and is poised ambivalently between light and dark, it will generally be the baser aspects of humanity that prevail...Mr. Pryce illuminates Shylock’s anguish so vividly, his face a contorted mask of spiritual suffering, that it all but erases any sense of contrasting light and dark in the play."
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"A stodgy, underwhelming affair. More or less Renaissance Venice in its period costumes and incidental music, Jonathan Munby’s staging is unfussy and direct, but rarely exciting...Pryce speaks his text with that mellifluous, subtly menacing delivery, shifting from complacent self-satisfaction to howling dismay. But his Shylock a generally passive, cerebral performance, all in the voice and very little in the body. Still, what a grand voice. Pryce is one of the last of the classically trained greats."
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"As the much maligned yet ethically questionable Jewish moneylender Shylock, Pryce's multifaceted performance is so nuanced that he dominates Jonathan Munby's mounting...During Pryce's offstage scenes, however, this 'Merchant of Venice' is disappointingly black-and-white. The romantic moments between the lovers never quite gel, with far too many of the performers fading into the background. Only in the climactic trial scene does this production come to life as a whole."
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"Jonathan Munby’s first-rate Shakespeare’s Globe production...Throughout, Munby keeps the disdain for Jews prominent...Pryce plays Shylock as a man of great dignity, despite (because of?) the hatred accorded him...During the parts of the play when the Shylock plot gets a breather and the competition for Portia’s hand and its aftermath takes focus, Munby hews to a more tradition approach every bit as successful as the enhanced Shylock episodes. He has a first-rate cast performing for him."
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"Live sightings of Jonathan Pryce are rare in New York...His complex, blazingly internalized Shylock is a reminder of how much we’ve been missing. Director Munby’s handsome, modest, stylistically jarring production is a mixed treasure. It is obnoxious in its audience-participation clowning, but harrowing in its violent juxtaposition of the merry Venetian gentiles and their unspeakably casual cruelty to the Jews."
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"Pryce’s portrait of Shylock in the dark and powerful production is brilliant and tragic. He invests his character with so much humanity that the distances of time and space vanish...All the performances, under the direction of Jonathan Munby, are excellent, with particularly stellar turns from the three women…A brilliant production, and a performance that will stay with you long after the torches go out."
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"The very best of what a traditional production can be, throwing light on the text but with enough new touches to preserve against boredom…Pryce’s Shylock rescued the role from being a 'comment' on race, and returned it to the story of a battered, angry and increasingly mad old man, pushed to savagery by the savagery around him…In this production he was rendered as a complexly as I’ve seen…The effect of the play was as of a punch to the gut."
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"Though the production might appear at the outset to be conventional, don’t be misled. Mike Britton’s richly brocaded costumes may be period-sumptuous, but this ever-problematic play forsakes sartorial pageantry to land with a telling sting in its tail. Suffice it to say that Mr. Munby and his largely expert company understand the difficulty in classifying as comic a play that is so dominated by the vilification of the Jewish moneylender Shylock."
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