[In the following review, Fischer calls Hansgünther Heyme's 2002 staging of The Merchant of Venice a “postmodern, transcultural production,” incorporating elements of Erwin Piscator's “Epic Theatre” as well as Noh theatre.]

Hansgünther Heyme's The Merchant of Venice, with its ideological stress on theatre as a form of “provocation” and its deployment of anti-illusionary techniques of “objective acting” and non-verbal gestures of “showing,” evinced an affinity with the “Epic Theatre” of his mentor, Erwin Piscator. It also alluded to Noh theatre. “Where does good end, and where does evil begin?” That was the question implicating all of the characters in this postmodern, transcultural production. According to the director, the only surety in the marshy terrain of Venice, as well as in the ideal world of Belmont, was money. Everything could be bought, and everything was for sale, including affection and love.

Cuts in Heyme's Merchant [The Merchant of Venice] were severe although they did not alter the core of the text, which was based on a faithful translation from The Oxford Shakespeare (1988). They were, however, sufficient to allow the text to be played without an interval and with only two blackouts (the first, at the end of 3.1, just after Shylock decides upon his revenge and Tubal runs off in utter horror; and the second following the jail scene in 3.3).

Design and interpretation were indistinguishable. A water system composed of silver piping three units deep ran the length of the curtain line and framed the set for both Venice and Belmont. The play opened in a bathhouse where the men were effetely dressed in long silky skirt-like garments or “sarongs” of varying tonalities. Salerio and Solanio wore black and white or brown and gold. Bassanio sported a pink top and a lavender wrap-around, a burnt-orange coat with a touch of red, and a fluffed white scarf that would emerge when he metamorphosed visibly into Morocco onstage. Antonio appeared with his head covered with a red cloth, a leitmotif that would come to connect him, however perversely, with Portia in the final scene. There was a clear homoerotic association between the merchant and his Bassanio from the start. The reflection of the sun's rays on the canals was suggested by lighting effects on a plastic curtain hanging in front of the upstage water system, which consisted of a green tiled tub adorned with ten or so golden taps attached to transverse piping, in addition to dual shower fixtures.

The production's depersonalized and crippled Portia, with her red wig and red silk garb, evoked for the director timeless Old World figures such as Elizabeth, Maria Teresa, Katherine of Russia, Marlene Dietrich. She used a cane and propped herself up on Nerissa; her handicap, which had erotic undertones, was intended to resonate with the dubious moral authority she exercised over men. Nerissa moved as though she were walking a tight rope in a balancing act; her black and white silky jumpsuit opened into a fan-shaped skirt. The automaton-like Balthasar resembled an androgynous Japanese “doll” clad in a jean-suit; she wore a bandage over the eyes to hide red under-coloring, which became visible when the eyepiece was removed for the metamorphosis into Launcelot Gobbo. A Christ-image emblazoned on the back of the jean-jacket signified the servant's shift from one master to the other, and there were similar sorts of emblematic costume changes for the other parts she played (i.e., Stefano, Jailer, Officer, Messenger). In this postmodern production, then, personality was a matter of temporary identities and multiple selves, revealed as the combination of fantasies, stylizations, and adopted stances.

Shylock, fastidiously clothed in a silky, white double-breasted suit, wore a rubbery yellow nasal prosthesis attached by black straps. If it resembled a feline-like mask, it evoked the yellow emblem worn by holocaust Jews, for Jessica displayed the same nasal contraption. Once she stole from her father's house, however, only the black straps remained to provide a marked reminder of her ethnic past. Shylock's speech was slow and ponderous, like that of an automaton; he would lose control only once in the company of Tubal. His proffering of the bond “in a merry sport” (1.3.138) was first missed by Antonio, but, after Shylock extended his hand as a sign of Christian “kindness,” the lovesick merchant discerned the calculated joke.

Just as Shylock had expressed revulsion at the smell of pork, so Antonio felt compelled to cleanse and disinfect the hand that had touched the Jew. He washed it under one of those multifarious tub taps that would be doubly associated with the font and the gas chambers in the trial scene. This was a symbolic action that heightened Shylock's tragic dimension as a victim of social ostracism, discriminatory law, and racial prejudice. The relatively sympathetic portrayal was enhanced by the omission of the lines—“I hate him for he is a Christian … / If I can catch him once upon the hip” (2.3.37-41). Spanish critics read this production in philo-semitic terms as a protest against the racism latent in multicultural societies, which is quick to erupt into intolerance and hatred. They connected it to recent events of Spanish history, like a new law of immigration that was being transacted with respect to aliens.

Certain details regarding the casket scenes deserve attention. The fact that the same actor trebled in the roles of Bassanio, Morocco, and Aragon left the impression that it was Bassanio's illicit game to try and sniff out beforehand which casket to elect. Morocco wrapped everyone in the ribbons hanging from the scrims embellished with Bosch drawings that represented the caskets. Portia's sexual attraction was apparent as she went for this Prince's groin; when he threw her off, she was at once visibly upset, so that when he departed she wished him “a gentle riddance” (2.7.78). Aragon actually chose the correct casket, but Nerissa quickly switched the ribbons, indicating that the lottery was in fact a setup in Bassanio's favor. The Spanish Prince was so tottering that he struggled to find the best light in which to read the schedule, whose content Nerissa mouthed, since she had clearly been there before. When Bassanio appeared as himself, he wore a red shirt, pink “sarong,” and fleecy maroon robe. A telltale ribbon was left as a marker near the lead casket. Unable to hide her physical attraction once the lottery had been won, Portia let go of her phallic cane. She fell strategically on top of Bassanio, and the two of them sucked erotically on each other's fingers. There was no doubt that Belmont was tainted by what money and sex could buy.

The trial scene was presided over by a poof of a Duke propped up on stilts in front of the prophetic shower piping. He was clad in a fan-shaped white garment that enveloped his upper body, and he wore long ornamental earrings. Shylock was so composed, and so intent on “justice” in the form of the bond, that he failed to see the perverse potential in his seemingly logical assertion that there would be no force in Venetian law if he were denied his judgment. His initial aplomb in the courtroom stood out in sharp contrast to the whimpering of Bassanio, who, in alternately burying his head in Antonio's groin, affecting a Buddhistic pose, and adopting a foetal position, seemed more the “tainted wether of the flock” (4.1.113) than Antonio. Portia, already physically unsteady in the courtroom sans walking stick, was patently undone by her husband's pathetic antics. Antonio, sporting a leopard fur jacket and that suggestive red cloth on his head, knelt in a sacrificial posture of prayer, resigned to the worst. Shylock's white suit gave him an air of surgical precision as he prepared, in depersonalized and automatous fashion, to cut into the merchant's flesh with a small paring knife.

If Shylock was the epitome of self-restraint even when the scales tipped in the opposite direction, Portia's displaced anger at Bassanio's histrionics made her lose control. Her husband, in fact, was so blinded by his love for Antonio that he did not even apprehend the turning point. The courtroom changed metaphorically into a baptismal font, a slaughterhouse, and a gas chamber. As Gratiano stood upstage behind the tub taps and Antonio opened them, Shylock lifted himself mechanically into the polysemous receptacle, emerged dripping in water, turned the shower on himself, and, in an expressionless tone, spoke the words “I pray you give me leave to go from hence. / I am not well” (4.1.391-92). Stripped of his soul, he removed both his nasal mask and yarmulke; his drenched white suit made him look at once naked and lifeless in the lighting. He dangled the yellow nose—the only vestige of his former identity—from the piping above the tub, then exited, emitting an extended OOOOOHHHHH. There was presumably little difference for the Jew between the font and the gas chamber.

Antonio, for his part, sauntered away ostensibly more distressed over the loss of Bassanio than contented at his own reprieve. His freedom seemed a fate almost worse than death. Portia appeared no less disturbed at the virtual mariage à trois, especially when she was given her husband's ring. In Belmont, Jessica was hardly at ease, as she stood beside the generic green tub with all its connotations, puffing on a cigarette as though it were her last before being baptized into Christian society. Lorenzo, in a gesture of pious hypocrisy, threw water on her face as he recited the words “In such a night / Did pretty Jessica, like a little shrew, / Slander her love, and he forgave her” (5.1.20-22). Shylock's daughter symbolically grabbed hold of her father's detached nose, still suspended from the faucet piping. Although her own nasal sign was gone, its strap marks were a poignant reminder of her former, or rather other, self.

The final Belmont scene revealed not so much connection as division. The last moments were performed to the offstage sound of shattered glass, and Launcelot entered holding a cracked hand mirror (presumably Jessica's). In quasi-Piscatorian and postmodern fashion, then, the spectators were presented with a fragmented mirror in which they could see themselves.