CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
The Merchant of Venice. By William Shakespeare. (Old Vic.) THERE can be something for everybody, even reviewers, in the lucky dip of the Merchant, and Hugh Hunt sees to it that nobody except rabid fault-finders need go off disgruntled. A rosy light bathes his production and gives it a surprising unity of mood. In Paul Rogers -there is a Shylock whose humanity the letter killeth, a fanatical fundamentalist of the lankest, most cringing, oleaginous, and generally poisonous variety. That is Mr. Rogers' Shylock, and Shakespeare's too, I daresay. There is no attempt (not even in the strings of rhetorical questions) to extort an ounce of pity from the audience; and at the conclusion of the exceptionally brilliant court scene, with the Jew grovelling and the Gentiles baiting him with a cruelty different in kind but not in degree from that which would have taken a mortal slice of Antonio, we look suddenly and sharply into a distant, disconcerting world. What a frosty breath of naturalism this is; and it is more miraculous than ever that the romantic comedy should have the power of wrapping the black irritant in a shimmering nacreous casket. Mr. Rogers' performance is memorable, yet Shylock can be shrugged from the memory in no more time than it takes him to stumble from the stage into oblivion, and at once we are returned to the glowing world of romantic artifice, travesty, sweet misunderstanding and delectable absurdity, where the only cruelty known is the playful one of lover-bait-lover. Irene Worth as Portia at Belmont is quite dazzling, and the slight modernity of her manner and costume (the play is dressed in eighteenth-century Venetian idiom) gives a lightly mannered, fanciful enchantment to the performance. At Venice, in breeches, wig and gown, she is Portia no longer, even to the audience, but the marvellous stranger whose forensic and poetic flights will save the day for comedy. Miss Worth's two performances one must speak of, for she translates, rather than disguises, herself when she puts on her sober clothes. Claire Bloom as Jessica has walked out of a picture- frame, and in her minor role may content herself with the knowledge that Delacroix could not have created anything more ravishing than the sight of her against the celestial patines of bright gold. Douglas Campbell plays Antonio (effectively) as stolid and middle-aged; Robert Urquhart is a straightforward Bassanio, without flourishes; Newton Buick as Old Gobbo and Kenneth Connor as Launcelot, Jane Wenham as Nerissa, and John Warner as the Prince of Aragon —all give excellent performances. Roger Furse's costumes and settings delight the eye; and, for myself, I found nothing to object to either in the architectural fancy which sprouted slowly from the stage whenever the scene changed from Venice to Belmont and shrank back into it for the return journey, or in the music of wood- wind and drum which marked these stately transitions. This is certainly one of Mr. Hunt's best, most lightly controlled and
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