The Merchant of Venice – Royal Lyceum Theatre
The Theatre for a New Audience production of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is, of course, not set in Venice. Instead, we are in an American city in the near future, though the play's fidelity to Shakespeare's script largely confines this setting to its physical set, designed by Riccardo Hernandez (a brutalist concrete set of steps before two rectangular doors and a circular window), the presence of costume designer Emily Rebholz' suits and mobile phones and, of course, the Jewish characters being portrayed by Black actors (the link between two different intolerances aided by the fact the play has racist as well as antisemitic portions).
This limits what the play can do to what Shakespeare did with it and, unfortunately, Shakespeare by today's standards is an antisemite. I...
