The Merchant of Venice, Almeida Theatre - theatre review

Susannah Fielding gives an outstanding performance as Portia in Rupert Goold's enlivening production, which moves the action to a Venetian-styled Las Vegas casino
Fiona Mountford13 June 2015

One thing you can always expect from director Rupert Goold is the unexpected, exuberantly staged. He's the man who brought us Enron, as well as an era-definingly exciting production of Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart.

He’s back on the Shakespeare trail again, this time relocating a highly problematic play, albeit one fixated by money, to a gaudy, glittering, Venetian-styled Las Vegas casino. The first words of the play are sung by an Elvis impersonator, who turns out to be Shylock’s servant Lancelot Gobbo.

The production, originally seen at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011, is exciting and enlivening. Perhaps inevitably, it tips over into excess and occasional elements of the updating jar. Is contemporary Las Vegas really so virulently anti-Semitic? Goold tackles this strand by going at it at an even fuller tilt, making the exceedingly tense court scene, complete with Antonio (Scott Handy) in an orange prison jumpsuit, like something out of Homeland.

It’s the nearest I’ve ever come to seeing Shylock (Ian McDiarmid, the Almeida’s former artistic director) being able to carve off an actual pound of flesh.

By far the most thrilling aspect of Goold’s reimagining is the character of Portia, given an outstanding performance by Susannah Fielding. We first encounter her as a southern-accented, Clueless-style airhead, who unfurls her romantic travails on a deliciously realised reality television show called Destiny. When she falls in love with Tom Weston-Jones’s charmless Bassanio, her accent and demeanour shift, intriguingly revealing her to be a nervy, insecure creature.

It doesn’t stop there. In the trial Portia, now disguised as a man, shows a highly vindictive streak, as if lashing out at the fact that her entire life has been cruelly dominated by the inexplicable whims of men. It’s a triumph of characterisation, of which both Goold and Fielding should be very proud.

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1/50

Until Feb 14 (020 7359 4404, almeida.co.uk)

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