Shakespeare's Globe, SE1
Add rain, and Shakespeare's Globe becomes perfect for The Merchant of Venice. The author's queasiest play needs only a downpour to bring out its rancid base notes of avarice and xenophobia. Any remaining bonhomie is blasted by the Globe's uniquely officious ushers, who spend the evening bustling around and nagging spectators. Like a gaggle of killjoy uncles, they hector the standees and mither through the plangent silences. They're right at home in The Merchant.
Rain fell steadily throughout last Saturday's show, accompanied by a glum rustle of rain capes. (The heroic groundlings, though open to the elements, mostly stayed put.) The Merchant is hardly festive at the best of times, unless misogyny and Jew-baiting are your bag. Shylock threatens to carve up a Christian merchant, and is ruined and forcibly converted; Bassanio drains the same merchant's account, then blithely marries money. Comic relief comes from sneering at foreigners and telling blind old men that their sons are dead.
It is a sobering exercise in the bottom line. It asks you not only what you value, but to put a price on love, faith, family and life itself. It felt right to watch such relentlessly mean behaviour through grey rain. With its water-stained walls, Rebecca Gatward's depressed, middling production inhabits the dank Venice of Don't Look Now, a bleak world with a price tag to make you wince.
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The designer, Liz Cooke, cleverly tweaks the Renaissance costumes. Bassanio and his pals look like Pete Doherty wannabes, with skinny breeches and trilbies tilted over one eye. Boozing, lairy, creasing up at their own jokes, they're a complete babyshambles. Although he sets his blue Burberry cap at an heiress, Philip Cumbus's breezy Bassanio struggles to remember her name, which doesn't bode well for romance. Nor does his notably chilly Portia. Kirsty Besterman lends her a crisp Penelope Keith disdain and a raised eyebrow that could freeze an espresso. It's hard to see this pair mussing the bedsheets (I'm guessing it'll be strictly Christmas and birthdays), especially as Bassanio looks into Portia's eyes only to enthuse: "I see myself!"
He also breaks the heart of Dale Rapley's dogged Antonio, the merchant who rashly secures a loan with his pound of flesh. Some first-nighters reported the crowd jeering Shylock, Borat-style, but last weekend it was the man-on-man snog that drew an "Euuw" from the Globe groundlings, always only an interval drink away from a lynch mob. Shylock himself is diminished in this production: testy rather than tragic. John McEnery's growling, whittled money-lender wears a dung-brown robe and a cap the colour of jaundice. Even his scraggy beard is mean. But the yellow star he wears, and the fact that he has to make his way past contemptuous gobbets of phlegm, explain why resentment clots in his throat.
And what awaits Shylock's self-hating daughter, Jessica, who elopes to join the goyim? Her instinctive lyricism is lost on her beloved's chums: eavesdropping on a romantic exchange, they merely snigger and snaffle her father's cash. Pippa Nixon's Jessica soon wonders what she has got into, especially when someone greets the newlyweds as "Lorenzo - and his infidel!". No wonder she gnaws at a pork sausage to prove she's not her father's daughter.
Closing a Venetian carnival scene, a drunk spews into the audience. Yup, our revels certainly now are ended. In the uneasily romantic coda, Gatward repeatedly wanders off into yawnsome comedy. A chirpy final jig even lets McEnery discard his beard and hug his estranged daughter, while everyone grins and gurns and assures us it's all right now. Want to put money on that?