Sunday 22nd June – Going on a dirty weekend with the merchant of venice

Last night I went to the theatre with Andrea.  Sometimes we just have to go to the theatre on a Saturday, despite our innate snobbery about Saturday audiences.  Without a Tardis you sometimes can’t do everything on the week night of your choice much though you might want to.  Sadly I am no nearer inventing or owning my own time machine, so bullets were bitten, vests were worn and the show went on.  I think Andrea and I had the part of the Muppets.  I’m Gonzo.  She’s the Swedish Chef.

 

We were going to the RSC in Stratford to see The Merchant of Venice.  We were apprehensive about this because last time we went to Stratford we missed the entire first half of the performance sitting in a puddle on the A46, and then when we got there we didn’t enjoy the second half of the performance and wished we had been sitting in a puddle on the A46.  We were worried that history might repeat itself, particularly as it was bucketing it down with rain all day.

 

My own more particular, personal worry was about the play itself.  When you go through school you sometimes find if you’re studying literature the same books come up time and again.  For me it was always The Merchant of Venice, or the Verchant of Menace as I like to think of it.  I remember studying it at least four times, and I’m sure that there were other times and I’ve just blotted them out because of the sheer horror of remembering it all.  Consequently I’ve always been rather biased against it, and until this evening had never been to see it. 

I knew I would have to go eventually if I were to fulfil my ambition to see all the plays, so it was going to have to happen.  It just seemed that given all the other evil portents, that this evening would either turn out to be a washout because we didn’t see it, or a washout because we did.  A lose, lose situation then.

 

As it turned out, despite the rain we got there in good time and actually managed to have dinner in the pub we had booked into last time, but hadn’t eaten in.  Apart from them mixing up mine and Andrea’s steaks and then putting so much cinnamon on my chocolate cheesecake I couldn’t see the cake itself until I sneezed and blew all the cinnamon off the top, it was very nice.  The average age of the waiting staff was about twelve.  I have noticed this alarming trend recently, that people who serve me in shops and tea rooms look like they’re on careers week from school, because they clearly can’t be old enough to actually have a job.  Another one of those terrible markers that signal my terrifying spiral into old age.  I shall be pushing to the front of queues, growing my own moustache and gratuitiously telling everyone how old I am next.

 

The play was surprisingly good.  I’m never going to love it, but I did find myself laughing out loud a few times, and in places where you were supposed to laugh out loud, which is a good sign.  The director had also gone for a cheery version, which made a pleasant change.  It is what is ominously known as one of the ‘problem’ plays.  I doubt that they were problem plays for Shakespeare who didn’t have our social qualms, but these days people specialise in getting their knickers in a knot about them.

 

The thing about a problem play is that it can go one of two ways.  Either the director blithely ignores the ‘problem’ bit of the play, dons his faux codpiece, slaps his manly thigh and gets on with it in a roustabout Elizabethan fashion, which is fine.  Or, he dons his Tony Blairalike, New Labour frown, forms a committee and spends six months in anguish, wringing his hands and trying to set it in the decimated rainforests of Papua New Guinea with cows dressed as Ronald McDonald roaming the set and people moping on giant barrels of crude oil.  This is also fine, but requires a bit more effort on the part of the cast and the audience.

 

For those of you who are not au fait with the story of ‘The Menace’ and its issues, here is my heavily edited version.  Bassanio is a feckless youth whose chosen subject is losing all his money and borrowing heavily from his ‘friends’.  He then loses that and wanders round being all fur coat and no knickers.  So, he is stupid and forgetful but ‘of good character’, which means he was posh enough for everyone to forgive him, despite him being a bit of a knob. 

This means that when he goes to his best friend Antonio, who is a wealthy merchant, and begs him for money so that he can go and woo a rich noble woman Antonio says ‘alrighty then’, but in a more Elizabethan way (i.e. it takes about fourteen lines. I am heavily influenced by Mr. S in my own writings).

 

The problem is that Antonio has tied up all his money investing in boats full of loot and has no ready cash.  He agrees that he will use his good name to borrow money for Bassanio from a crazy old Jew money lender called Shylock.  He does this, according to current literary theories, because he is a raving homosexual who is madly in love with Bassanio and wants to have his man babies.  Usually at this point Antonio signifies his lust with lots of sighing, batting his unfeasibly long eyelashes and stroking the front of his doublet in a suggestive manner.

 

Shylock is crazy because all the Christians spend their every spare moment annoying him and being rude to him because he’s a Jew and he’s really fed up of it.  He’s also a bit keen on money, which helps make him just that little bit more mental. Shylock particularly hates Antonio who is so frustrated from the fact that he can’t have Bassanio that he takes it all out on Shylock by behaving in a particularly repellent manner towards him, and then expects him to lend him money and not get upset about it.  Shylock says that he will only make the deal for the moolah if Antonio agrees that if he can’t pay him back, he will give him a pound of his flesh instead.  That’ll learn him.

 

Antonio, who is also a cocky bastard, says yes, despite everyone thinking he’s a bit of a mentalist for entering into such a deal with someone else who is clearly a mentalist.  I think he’s showing off for Bassanio.  Bassanio doesn’t care, and deserts his pink best friend as fast as possible, taking the money and running off to Belmont to win the hand of the lady Portia and become a rich man, thanks to his new wife.  Cue Antonio bereft and lovelorn, weeping at the docks waiting for his boats to come in.

 

Portia can’t marry Bassanio until he’s played a crazy guessing game with three boxes made of gold, silver and lead.  It’s all part of her dead father’s will in which he promises the hand of his daughter to the man who can guess which box her portrait is in because he’d much rather be a game show host than a responsible, loving father.  Luckily, Bassanio, who is as dumb as a sack full of hammers, but not as repellent as her other suitors, guesses right and wins the lady.  He’s just celebrating his release from poverty and a life of shagging a rich bird and gracing the front pages of Elizabethan OK magazine (called, ‘Forsooth’, one groat every fortnight),  when he gets news that all of Antonio’s boats have sunk, he can’t pay Shylock his money.  Bassanio’s words on hearing this news are: ‘Oh crap!’

 

Shylock is sharpening his knife on his boot in readiness for the rending of flesh and capering about, up to his eyes in bloodlust and dreams of Antonio dying in writhing agony.

 

Bassanio feels badly about this and rushes off to try to help Antonio by getting upset and saying; ‘Oy! That’s not fair!’ in a totally useless and feeble manner.  In the meantime, Portia, who is now saddled with a buffoon of a husband, replacing her buffoon of a dead father, saves the day by dressing up as a clever lawyer man, and releasing Antonio from the bonds of oppression.  Everyone is happy and it all ends with a big dance, apart from poor Shylock who has to stop sharpening his knife in order to convert to Christianity and give all his money away for being naughty.

 

Now that might not sound like the edited version but believe me.  This play runs in at three hours long, and I’ve missed out all the songs, the hilarious comic interludes and the complex sub plots involving two other marriages and Shylock’s complicated relationship with his ingrate of a daughter.  For Shakespeare that’s short.

 

Now you can see why it’s called a problem play.  Any play in which a man is playing a manic depressive, repressed homosexual pining for the love of a feckless, money loving, shag merchant, who spend their spare time persecuting Jews for fun is always going to be difficult.  In fact, I think the term ‘problem play’ doesn’t really do it justice in this day and age.

 

Anyway, on this occasion the cast and director handled it very well and didn’t go all out for a three hour rant on political asylum, the holocaust and the plight of repressed homosexual adventurers, which for me was all to the good.  I don’t mind this on occasion, but I like to be forewarned so that I can take some Rescue Remedy and wear comfier shoes.

 

The staging was minimal, there were no Austin Powers Fembots, no strobe lighting and a distinct lack of fire extinguishers, which were all excellent things.  There were quite a lot of icicles, some wine glasses being played as musical instruments and some bits of glass on string.  Unusual, but effective, and acceptable as far as I was concerned.  The costumes were sort of 1950’s Enid Blyton, apart from Portia who wore a very clingy white jersey wedding dress which was rather see through.  She seemed to be wearing stout foundation garments, although her bra was a bit too lifty and separatey for comfort, and I believe she may have been wearing control, tummy sculpting type pants to be on the safe side.  I can’t say I’d have done it differently in that sort of costume to be honest.

 

The audience, as we had expected, were somewhat problematic.  The woman behind me clearly hadn’t been to the theatre since 1982, and was very worried that there was no curtain, and were we sure it was a proper theatre? The programmes, ice creams at the interval and the large amounts of acting confirmed it for me, but I suppose it’s better to be safe than sorry.  She seemed rather unnerved by the stage, which is what is known in the trade as a ‘thrust’ stage.  This just means it sticks out in a project runway type way.  The woman was recommending that her partner put his feet on the stage.  As there are about six entrances and exits which the actors use, and she was suggesting he put his feet right in the path of one of them I have the feeling that maybe she worked for the Old Vic, the dizziness was all a ruse and she just wanted the actor playing Shylock to trip over and break his ankle in a drive by tripping sort of way.  He refused.

 

There was a man who did his own production by producing a series of impressively theatrical sneezes, complete with comedy spotted handkerchief and a lot of shaking his head like a horse, which was quite unnerving.  We also spotted a woman who had a demi beehive thing going on at the front of her head, and virtually no hair behind.  She looked rather like a Great Crested Grebe, which I’m sure wasn’t the look she was aiming for when she came out, but which was my top moment of the entire evening.

 

While I was in the queue for the toilet in the interval I was stuck in front of a couple of women having a lovely conversation.  They spent a good five minutes discussing the appropriate use of leg room in the theatre: ‘Oh! No matter how hard I try, I just can’t help crossing my legs. I’m a martyr to it.  I’ve tried, but I just can’t help myself.’  This was followed by the other one saying: ‘Do you know, I’ve always had a soft spot for Stratford, because it’s the first place I ever went for a dirty weekend?’  To which the other one replied: ‘Oh yes, which hotel did you go to?’ Which of all the questions you could ask a middle aged woman who has just confessed that she went on a dirty weekend is certainly the most boring and inappropriate. Ten out of ten for her for that one.