Carnovsky Great in 'Merchant of Venice'

STRATFORD, Conn.-It has become fashionable in the last few years for stage directors, especially young ones, to pick up a classic that is generally conceded to be a light comedy and so stage it that it comes out a "dark" or "black" comedy. This is precisely what Michael Kahn, aged 29, has done with The Merchant of Venice now in view at the American Shakespeare Festival.

The result, while not executed as well as it might be, is still consistently engrossing. I don't think anyone can rightly accuse Kahn of violently distorting the play. His approach is perfectly workable -- up to a point. That point is the final scene, with its moonlit love-making; although it takes place at night, not all the king's horses and all the king's men could turn this scene into something "dark" or "black".

Much of the responsibility here falls on Shakespeare. For Merchant is a pretty silly play, a widely uneven play, an inadequately controlled play, a poorly shaped play. This is not to say that it isn't a good play when seen in the context of all plays, but just that, within the oeuvre of Shakespeare himself, it falls qualipatively well down in the bottom half of his output. No matter what approach one brings to the work, there is a shift of tone between the first four acts and the fifth. The material for a black-comedy interpretation is undeniably present in the text; when it is tapped to the hilt, though, the ines-capable gap now becomes a gulf.

Gulf or no gulf, I am grateful to Kahn for essaying this experiment. And I am particularly glad he did it with this play. For of all Shakespeare's works Merchant is the best known and, for some reason, the most popular. Everybody has read it in secondary school. It's a work everyone feels comfortable with (if not comfortable about); he knows its ups and downs, twists and turns, nooks and crannies. The play is like a well-worn glove. And now again we put it on confidently -- and the glove pinches; it's no longer what we thought it was. This is all a highly beneficial phenomenon: it is good that we be made to reconfront and reexamine the supposedly familiar; the experience can be enlightening and sobering.

The present production does not keep us in doubt for long. Before the performance even begins we see a huge golden lion-rampant hanging in front of a blue cyclorama -- the lion being a traditional symbol of gold, and gold having long been termed "the lion of metals." Underneath we note part of two arched Venetian foot-bridges, both of gold. A short masque takes place on stage, but we are put somewhat ill-at-ease by the dissonant musical score provided by Richard Peaslee (a far cry from the pleasant harmonies Virgil Thomson composed for the Festival's Merchant of exactly ten years ago).

As the various characters appear and the tale unfolds, we find ourselves in the midst of a mass of unpleasant people. Shylock is not the only person interested in ducats; it seems that just about everybody in Venice and Belmont is a materialistic money-grubber. The very name Shylock is a transliteration of shalach, a Hebrew word for bird-of-prey; but here, almost all the characters are, in their diverse ways, birds-of-prey. These are unsavory people, notably lacking in spiritual values. (Is director Kahn trying to show us an image of mid-20th-century society?)

Bassanio is generally thought to be an attractive young man, "a scholar and a soldier," and, Portia states, "the best deserving a fair lady." But John Cunningham uses an annoyingly exaggerated clipped delivery, and his inflections leave no doubt that he is less drawn to the fair lady than to her wealth ("a lady richly left,"sunny locks. . . like a golden fleece"). And when Shylock puts a finger on his shoulder, he pulls back in a gesture of loathing.M

John Devlin plays Antonio, the eponymous merchant, with a good deal of snarling, and puts plenty of punch into his diatribe against Shylock's "Jewish heart." At the end of the show, when all the plots have been straightened out and all the pairs of lovers hooked up, Kahn keeps Antonio alone on the stage after all the others have exited, and the merchant slowly tears in two the letter in his hand. We are not to have our package tied up with a blue-ribbon bow.

Tom Aldredge is the talkative Gratiano. In the Trial Scene, when the tables are turned on Shylock, Gratiano indulges in not just the usual sarcasm; he positively relishes the chance to stamp on Shylock when he's down. Shakespeare contented himself with telling us that Shylock has oft been spat upon. Here, at Shylock's last exit, we actually see Gratiano (ironic name!) spit upon the Jew-- just as, in an earlier scene, we are treated to the spectacle of seeing his fellow Jew, Tubal spat on.

Shylock's daughter, who elopes with the Christian Lorenzo, gives the impression, as played by Maria Tucci, of treating her Jewish heritage very lightly. Before you know it, she appears wearing a crucifix, and crosses herself as to the manner born and of the manna shorn. Jack Ryland's Lorenzo, moreover, is hardly worth the trouble of eloping with.

For the scenes in Portia's Belmont, Ed Wittstein has designed an outdoor garden setting dominated by an enormous tree branch with leaves of -- you guessed it -- gold. Portia appears in a peach gown (designed, like all the other costumes, by Jose Varona) and carrying a parasol. It is not long before we realize that this Portia, in the hands of Barbara Baxley, is a thoughtless, superficial woman, and probably frigid to boot. Miss Baxley's nasal and mindless mode of speaking doesn't help much, either; she constitutes no improvement over Katharine Hepburn, who was so disastrous a Portia in the Festival's 1957 production.

Now Portia has long been a symbol of justice, and has even lent her name to law schools. But this Portia is out-and-out dishonest. When the suitors for her hand come to make their choices from among the caskets, they are of course supposed to have free rein, as prescribed in her father's will. But this Portia does everything she can to lead the princes of Morocco and Arragon to a wrong choice and Bassanio to the right one. She cheats on her own father.

Robert Kya-Hill, in a white robe with gold trim, is an imposing Prince of Morocco, but he doesn't get out of the part as much as Earle Hyman did a decade ago. (As often done, Morocco's two scenes are fused into one, which is detrimental to the play's structure, such as it is). When he chooses wrong and has departed, Portia points up the racial slur in her tag-line, "Let all of his complexion choose me so." As for the Prince of Arragon, James Valentine makes him a heavily accented and logorrheicninny; and, when he goes, Portia just can't resist making fun of his Castilian accent. She should talk! Much later, when she is identified by Lorenzo through her voice only, her comment-- "He knows me as the blind man knows the cuckoo,/By the bad voice." -- is far from the witticism she intends. Her confidante Nerissa, as Marian Hailey plays her, comes over as rather strident. Jerry Dodge tries hard as young Gobbo, and Tom Lacy vastly overplays old Gobbo; it is, anyhow, well-nigh impossible to salvage their scene, which is one of the unfunniest comic scenes ever written by a genius.

Shakespeare's great accomplishment in this play is the character of Shylock. Although Shylock appears in only five of the twenty scenes, he dominates the work easily. So full and complex is he that he cannot really be contained within the play. He bursts into a larger world of his own, so that we can almost say that the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Controversy still rages about Shylock. Is the play anti-Semitic? Was it intended to be? Can one remain unaffected by the knowledge of the systematic slaughter of five million Jews under Hitler? The title of the First Quarto of 1600 and the Second Quarto of 1619 runs, in part: "The most excellent Histories of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylock the Iewe towards the sayd Merchant. . . ." The fact is that Shakespeare, and Elizabethan Londoners generally, could have had little if any first-hand knowledge of Jews, since Jews had been banished from England at the end of the thirteenth century and were not readmitted until the middle of the seventeenth.

The Shylock that Shakespeare drew was no type; he was an intensely individual man, with many facets to his make-up. Whatever the playwright intended, the character is so complex that it can readily be treated as essentially farcical, or villainous, or sentimental, or patriarchal, or pathetic, or tragic, or.... We do know that Richard Burbage, who first played the role, made Shylock a comic figure. On the other hand, Beerbohm Tree early in our own century showed us a hysterical Shylock, who, on finding his daughter gone, ranted and howled through the house, tore his garments, threw himself on the floor and poured ashes on his head. This return home is not even indicated anywhere by Shakespeare, but has become common in performance, though handled with much more restraint in most instances (as Kahn does in this production). After all, Shakespeare does make Shylock's feelings known in his own good time.

The Shylock of the 1957 production was Morris Carnovsky. Now, a decade later, Carnovsky is Shylock again. His was a supreme portrayal now. Shylock is not the most difficult role Carnovsky has undertaken, but it is the one that he has completely fleshed out and raised to the level of absolute perfection. I do not mean to imply that his portrayal is a frozen one. For, while both versions achieved perfection, they are markedly different.

Carnovsky himself has lucidly discussed his original view of the part in the essay "On Playing the Role of Shylock," which he wrote for the 1958 Laurel edition of the work, and which I highly recommend. Carnovsky's 1967 Shylock is a considerably less sympathetic figure than the 1957 one, though by no means thoroughly odious. This change is quite in keeping with Kahn's new approach to the rest of the dramatis personae.

Although Carnovsky is now ten years older, his current Shylock strikes me as being about ten years younger than the former one, even though he now sits down more than he did before. And he now relies more strongly on the motive of revenge than he used to. Carnovsky has wholly mastered that curious unique diction used by Shylock, with its short bursts of speech and verbal repetitions; he has assimilated it so well that he has even added a few repetitions of his own.

There are simply no false notes. Carnovsky makes everything ring true. And the famous set speeches emerge naturally out of the fabric of the character rather than as so many interpolated arias. But even in a short line Carnovsky manages to convey the fifty lines that lie unspoken behind it.

He reaches his peak, of course, in the Trial Scene -- which Kahn has staged admirably, and which is marred chiefly by a mechanical delivery on Portia's part that extends even to the "quality of mercy" speech. Carnovsky's playing throughout this scene is a marvel. Here he lets himself lose control twice and shatters courtroom decorum by pounding on the judge's bench as though he were Khruschchev banging his shoe in the United Nations assembly. His modulation from this to his final "I am content" is masterly. When he makes his final exit, he stumbles on the stairs, then goes on -- defeated, but not crushed. This is a performance so complex, so complete, so compelling that one hesitates to apply the term acting to it at all.

We have before us, then a Shylock who is repeatedly called a dog. And this Shylock has indeed become a dog. He has, in fact, become top dog. The point, however, is that he is top dog among dogs (and bitches). If you do not like the idea of this view of the world, this should not keep you away from Kahn's production. For we are not likely to have a greater Shylock in our time than Morris Carnovsky's