2008 Woodie Awards
How much Pricking, Bleeding and Revenging will it take to get the real Shylock back?
Menachem Wecker
Issue date: 3/29/05 Section: Arts & Culture
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Shylock
Written by and starring Gareth Armstrong
Perry Street Theatre, New York
January 30-March 27, 2005
http://www.shylocktheplay.com/
A Case for Shylock: Around the World with Shakespeare's Jew
By Gareth Armstrong
185459785X, Nick Hern Books; (April 15, 2005)
The Merchant of Venice (2004)
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Michael Radford
http://www.sonyclassics.com/merchantofvenice/
Some Jew must have poisoned the Hollywood water en route to baking his gourmet blood matzos, for all of a sudden the hot new actor all the directors are chasing about waving large contracts in their sweaty, chubby palms wears an ID tag that says "anti-Semitism." Mel Gibson flirted with him in "The Passion of the Christ," and now Michael Radford has emerged center stage in the courting. Radford's "The Merchant of Venice" casts Al Pacino as a Shylock who does not look unlike Mattia Sbragia's Caiphas in Gibson's movie, and where William Shakespeare's Shylock achieves a nobility on par with the disillusioned King Lear howling "Singe my white head!" and "Crack nature's moulds" at the storm, Pacino's interpretation opts for a Shylock who foams at the mouth and shakes jerkily about like a madman as he delivers his "Prick us do we not bleed" soliloquy.
There is a reason for all this, of course. It's called dramatic enfranchisement.
Shakespeare is perfectly content to feature secondary and tertiary actors in his plays. He recognizes the value of a character standing on stage who delivers no lines. He envisions a team of actors that works much like a machine, with each specialized element doing its own job. Many postmodern audiences cannot stand this. When they see a character on stage they immediately ask where she was born, whom he supported in the last election. They want the unofficial biography and the collected unprinted memoirs. This method of reading a cast as if it were plastered on the gossip pages of the tabloids has done wonders for the political and educational arenas, but it has forced modern playwrights and authors into a tight corner. Every modern production of "Merchant" must be about enfranchising Shylock and nudging him into a central, heroic position that Shakespeare hardly intended for him.
Written by and starring Gareth Armstrong
Perry Street Theatre, New York
January 30-March 27, 2005
http://www.shylocktheplay.com/
A Case for Shylock: Around the World with Shakespeare's Jew
By Gareth Armstrong
185459785X, Nick Hern Books; (April 15, 2005)
The Merchant of Venice (2004)
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Michael Radford
http://www.sonyclassics.com/merchantofvenice/
Some Jew must have poisoned the Hollywood water en route to baking his gourmet blood matzos, for all of a sudden the hot new actor all the directors are chasing about waving large contracts in their sweaty, chubby palms wears an ID tag that says "anti-Semitism." Mel Gibson flirted with him in "The Passion of the Christ," and now Michael Radford has emerged center stage in the courting. Radford's "The Merchant of Venice" casts Al Pacino as a Shylock who does not look unlike Mattia Sbragia's Caiphas in Gibson's movie, and where William Shakespeare's Shylock achieves a nobility on par with the disillusioned King Lear howling "Singe my white head!" and "Crack nature's moulds" at the storm, Pacino's interpretation opts for a Shylock who foams at the mouth and shakes jerkily about like a madman as he delivers his "Prick us do we not bleed" soliloquy.
There is a reason for all this, of course. It's called dramatic enfranchisement.
Shakespeare is perfectly content to feature secondary and tertiary actors in his plays. He recognizes the value of a character standing on stage who delivers no lines. He envisions a team of actors that works much like a machine, with each specialized element doing its own job. Many postmodern audiences cannot stand this. When they see a character on stage they immediately ask where she was born, whom he supported in the last election. They want the unofficial biography and the collected unprinted memoirs. This method of reading a cast as if it were plastered on the gossip pages of the tabloids has done wonders for the political and educational arenas, but it has forced modern playwrights and authors into a tight corner. Every modern production of "Merchant" must be about enfranchising Shylock and nudging him into a central, heroic position that Shakespeare hardly intended for him.
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