Word: shylock
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...this some cultured character out of the pages of Henry James? One of the gentry from The Forsyte Sagal Hardly. It is Shakespeare's "wolvish, bloody" Shylock, in a provocative new production of The Merchant of Venice by London's National Theatre...
Engine of Commerce. The point is as clear as it is contemporary. Money and goods are what the Venetian world turns on. But in Miller's conception, the obsession is shared not only by Shylock and his fellow usurers but also among those who look down on Shylock-Christian merchants, lovers, well-born ladies. All levels of society are driven by the engine of commerce, in marriage contracts no less than in other transactions...
...short, Miller takes a one-sided view of the play, but it is a strong side. For one thing, it makes the play more than ever Shylock's play. And as Shylock, Miller has Laurence Olivier-at 62, performing the role for the first time in his career. In keeping with the period setting, Olivier does away with the hooked nose, greasy locks and biblical rantings that have served stage Shylocks down through the centuries. His is a Jew who has come out of the ghetto and into his own, proving that you can teach an old dog nouveau...
Unhappily, the purity of the tribal footage is often adulterated with synthetic ingredients. When it is in English, the dialogue is an unstable amalgam of Shylock and Hiawatha: "When you fight the enemy and arrows pierce your skin, you bleed like all men." And in the part of Running Deer's mother, Dame Judith Anderson is relegated to pantomimic mother-in-law jokes. Despite these lapses-and a pseudopoetic slow-motion lyricism-A Man Called Horse has one estimable benefit: it avoids the white-race-is-the-cancer-of-history reproof that has marred much of the New Indian...
...most difficult feats in acting is to play, in tandem, the rival roles created by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Two such matching pairs exist to test the sweep and sinew of an actor's craft: Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Shylock, Marlowe's Edward II and Shakespeare's Richard II. The last actor to play the two Jews on successive nights was Eric Porter at Stratford on Avon in 1965. Now, for the first time since 1903, the two kings are being doubled in repertory by an English actor named...