[In the following excerpted review, Smallwood observes that Gregory Doran's Stratford production of The Merchant of Venice offered no new insights into the play.]

Gregory Doran's The Merchant of Venice started as it meant to go on, with a determination to fill the space, its opening dumb-show of merchants, Jewish and Gentile, congregating on the Venetian dockside in the half light of a February day, lasting several minutes before the play's first line. With a dark mist rising and black stone walls oozing damp, cargo was examined and valued while prostitutes stood around hopefully waiting for customers: everything was for sale here, including sexual companionship; and from this we moved to the scene in which Bassanio seeks another loan from Antonio.

Doran's production had nothing particularly startling to tell us about the play, no new directorial reading to offer. In some ways it was rather safe; but what it did well was to provide actors with the chance to explore their roles in organic interaction. One saw this at once in the first scene, with Julian Curry's pale, austere, emaciated Antonio, terribly unbending but with a kind of wasted elegance, confronting Scott Handy's noisy, boisterous Bassanio. In Bassanio slid, flat on his stomach, from some bit of off-stage larking about with others of the laddish crew with whom he drinks too much and makes lots of noise in the streets. He had arrived late, and half-drunk, for an important meeting with a man who—and this we learned as soon as their eyes met—loved him deeply. Bassanio tried to touch him on the cheek; Antonio flinched, not wanting to be patronized, or teased, in this way. There was impatience from Antonio at Bassanio's slowness in coming to the point, a touch of tetchiness at his indirectness in asking for money, and a foreboding appropriateness in his giving Bassanio his ring to help in the attempt to raise it. The understatedness of Curry's performance was absolutely right in establishing the tensions of the relationship.

Philip Voss had not chosen to understate his Shylock, and the result was equally appropriate to the overall balance of the production. His first scene established his loathing for Antonio, smarming round and pawing Antonio's young friend, insisting on lots of handshakes, using the story of Laban's sheep to mime the homosexual act, swiping at Antonio's genitals as he spoke of the pound of flesh. His farewell to Jessica was very precisely observed: he was obsessed with the handing over of the keys, while she, anxious not to seem anxious to get hold of them, wrapped his scarf a little more neatly round his neck, then dodged back to him for a last little kiss—of guilt and of tenderness too. The invention of Shylock's vision of Jessica being carried away on someone's shoulders in the swirl of music and torches and hideously pig-masked revellers was, perhaps, to hammer home the point a little strenuously, but it led to a rather nice little Irvingesque moment as Shylock returned to his empty house to find his world, and his entrance hall, spinning out of control. ‘Let him look to his bond’, he was saying when we next met him, and the second time he said it we saw, with startling clarity, the idea suddenly strike him—a brilliantly focused moment. The fierce anger (no self-pity at all) of ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’, the tenderness with which he wiped off the spit that Salerio and Solanio had deposited on Tubal's beard, the anguished immediacy of his recall of Leah's turquoise, led to the howl of pain that ended the first half of the production and that seemed to come from a very ‘ancient grudge’ indeed.

The production would have been offering us ‘The Tragedy of Shylock’ if Helen Schlesinger's Portia had not been so striking and intelligent a performance. Her restless energy when we first met her, pacing around the room taking the labels off her suitors' ostentatious gifts, her wry humour, her clear resentment of the restrictions of her father's will and loyal determination to obey them, her obvious fear that Morocco or Aragon might choose right (and the hamming up of those performances made that fear understandable), all this put enormous pressure on Bassanio's choosing scene. This was played with total commitment and seriousness, as though the feckless young man we had watched in Venice had suddenly, through the influence of Belmont, seen things clearly for the first time in his life. The wonderful sense of pent-up joy released when he chose right, then dashed again by the arrival of the messengers from Venice, was impressive. ‘O love … dispatch’, she said when Antonio's letter was read, and ‘love’ was not a vocative but the abstract noun, signalling her realization of the emotional complexities she would face in Venice.

In the trial scene Portia was, believably enough, uncomprehending at first that Shylock would not be bought off. She clearly expected the graciousness of her argument about mercy, the persuasive eagerness with which it was uttered, the self-evident need for a surgeon, to be convincing to her adversary. Only slowly did she begin to perceive the full depth of loathing with which she had to deal and the extent of her husband's commitment to Antonio as she was forced to watch the long, slow hug between them that provoked Shylock's sardonic ‘These be the Christian husbands’. This Portia didn't have her clever little solution all sewn up before she came into court; the acting was on the moment, with the contest between the play's two impulses, to comedy or to tragedy, on the knife-edge. Moments later, as Shylock's own knife-edge lingered for a long time on Antonio's chest, trying different angles for slicing, there was a slight danger that a third genre, melodrama, might come into the equation. At the end of the scene there was another flirtation with the melodramatic as Shylock, who had collapsed in the heap of gold coins that Bassanio had thrown down in evidence that he had the repayment money ‘here, in the court’, struggled to rise to his feet. He skidded and slithered about, his forlorn gestures for help ignored, providing an image that was undoubtedly impressive, iconic even, but perhaps just too self-consciously contrived. The coins remained there for the final scene's return to Belmont, so that Lorenzo sat with Jessica on a bank thick inlaid with ducats of bright gold, an image that insisted on the play's constant shuttling between love and money: ‘Since you are dear bought I will love you dear’. Its final image was of four men clinging to the prizes that the story has given them, three of them to women who have brought them wealth, the fourth to a letter, a sort of ‘bond’, that promises him wealth too. A fifth man, who signed a bond to ‘buy your love’ and ended with neither love nor money, was not there.