Despite being trimmed to just two hours, Abigail Graham’s production of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ takes a surprisingly long time to get to the point.
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Graham’s Merchant clocks in at 2 and a quarter hours, largely by cutting to the meat of a play that, after all, hinges on the delivery of a pound of flesh. As a result, the play is pacy and vivid, sometimes raucously funny but more often troublingly trenchant.
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Grappling with the complexities of what is potentially Shakespeare’s most problematic play, director Abigail Graham’s bold production of The Merchant of Venice never pulls its punches.
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But it’s so extreme and one-sided in its portrayal that it becomes a hectoring lesson about colossal historic and current wrongs, rather than a complex drama that holds up a mirror and invites us to confront our own prejudices.
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...Adrian Schiller’s superbly understated, steely but all too human Shylock forces us to accept that mitigation, as a subset of mercy, is the most Antonio should plead. Perhaps Shylock’s story has never been told more compassionately.
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Shakespeare’s challenging text has been streamlined to a neat two hours in this contemporary production. Its innards have been snipped and significantly shuffled...The result is a production cleanly cut, sharply told.
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Graham’s staging has been described as an attempt by her and an adept cast of ten to “reclaim” the play. What this entails is substantial cutting...Purists may object, but it works.
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The cast is strong all round...In a production examining the pain of unequal power structures, the closing message is one of tentative hope.
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