A Casual Prejudice in ‘Merchant’

Ben Jonson, no hack though no Shakespeare, was right: The Bard of Avon was “not of an age, but for all time.” In certain Shakespeare plays, however, timeless art runs smack into the prejudices of the age creating it. And the art cannot get up again, at least not without a struggle.

“The Merchant of Venice” is one of those plays. It is controversial for a notorious, richly troubling one-word reason: Shylock.

Shakespeare’s villain is the Jewish moneylender demanding his “pound of flesh” and receiving instead a comeuppance and an order to convert to Christianity. He is stripped of his identity, and more.

Shylock also speaks the “hath not a Jew eyes?” lines Shakespeare had the good sense to create. Shakespeare could not help but complicate his audience’s notions of the typical, venal stereotype. A few years earlier, Christopher Marlowe perpetuated the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes going in “The Jew of Malta.” “The Merchant of Venice” played into similar mass-audience prejudices. But Shakespeare managed to lend something of his own: a remarkable, contradictory character, and a thorny theatrical puzzle to solve.

Trevor Nunn directed “Merchant” recently at the Royal National Theatre in London. He set it in late 1920s cafe society, between the wars, with an air of louche , languorous prejudice hanging over every scene. Now, “Masterpiece Theatre” is airing a TV version of that production, directed by Nunn with Chris Hunt.

It’s not dynamic television. But it’s a cool, smart, thoughtful take on the play.

Nunn and his company, with the notable aid of Henry Goodman’s Shylock, presents a holy war between Christians and Jews, waged with persistent, casual slights, injuries, weary japes. The chosen era makes sense. The Holocaust looms on the horizon, and the thunder we hear in the closing moments heralds something unimaginably sinister.

Some of us can never quite resolve the worthwhile difficulties of “Merchant” with the stuff that’s just plain difficult. Nunn has a solid if rather indistinct Portia in Derbhle Crotty (who, in male drag, resembles a distant cousin of Stephen Fry’s Jeeves). But the courtship scenes between Portia and her suitors drag on. They tend to. Always.

However, there are fine performances from David Bamber’s melancholy merchant Antonio, here clearly mad about the boy that is Bassanio (Alexander Hanson, also fine), in love with Portia. Gabrielle Jourdan is extremely moving as Jessica, Shylock’s conflicted daughter.

Goodman portrays Shylock as a man on a tightrope, used to putting on an act for his Christian borrowers, revealing bits of his interior self to the camera in soliloquy. He and Nunn make him a plausible, formidable figure. Visually, Nunn doesn’t overstress Shylock’s entrance or first few exchanges; we’re allowed to get to know him gradually. Even when the narrative mechanics begin working against this stage villain, he remains a human being.

When Peter Hall directed Dustin Hoffman as Shylock on Broadway, Hall (like others before him) chose to underline the play’s Christian-on-Jew racism with the heaviest possible hand. The spit flew early and often in that production. Nunn’s smartest contribution to the ongoing “Merchant” debate is his creation of a world ruled by a more insidiously casual sense of evil. It’s martini-swilling, very English prejudice, with a smile.

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“The Merchant of Venice” airs Monday at 9 p.m. on KCET. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).