★★★★☆
Four Stars
What is a previewer to say about The Merchant of Venice in Worcester? One can only shower praise over what will likely be a dramatic feat, and perhaps the event of the year for Oxford theatre. Still, let me check my excitement and, for a start, just stick to the facts.
So, Worcester College is ‘the one with the lake’. Well, The Merchant of Venice is that play on the lake. And by on I do not mean ‘beside’, but literally on it. The production features two boats. One is a ‘stately, opulent one’, the Lucinda Dawkins, the director, explains. The other is ‘like a water taxi’ that will allow actors to move swiftly across the vast grounds (and waters) where the action takes place.
Among the trees nearby, lanterns and fairy lights will be lit, and during the interval, a hundred candles will appear. There will be live music, with Chris Williams, a Worcester-based composer, creating pieces specifically for the production. A bit of a spoiler here – the show will end in a Shakespearean jig, accompanied by ‘trumpets, drums, and a lute’. This will be a festival of a play, and the famous Worcester gardens will be transformed into a veritable wonderland (the story goes that they inspired Lewis Carroll for his Wonderland, so here we come full circle).
In short, it is going to be a feast.
You might be thinking, as I did, that the one possible problem with such a show is that the drama itself may not do justice to the out-of-this-world set. Would the acting be diminished by all the opulence? The preview dispelled my doubts, and only left me more impatient to see the real thing. Dawkins’ directorial style seems well suited to the challenge. It was a delight to witness her highly physical mode of theatre, with lots of movement, strength exercises, jumping, shouting, actors clapping their hands, slapping their thighs, and thumping their feet as they dance in a circle.
‘Tense everything up. Buttocks, toes’, Dawkins instructs her cast. ‘Breathe in – tension. Tension, tension.’ Dawkins explains that, to her, it is easier to convey emotion when you know what it feels like physically. So it is all about breathing, choreography, ‘constructing a dynamic’.
The cast acted out the scene where Antonio seals his bloody deal of giving away ‘a pound of flesh’. The actors begin the scene by pushing against a wall, then jump onto the stage; the tension created among them is visceral, elastic, and brings them closer together, to a confrontation, then pulls them apart. ‘Suppress, suppress, suppress, then use the energy’, Dawkins says, as she herself moves around the stage, pacing, skipping, conveying her own inexhaustible energy to the actors.
‘What this whole scene is about is running into walls and coming off them’, she says. And indeed, we can feel Antonio and Shylock, his enemy, coming against each other, their egos colliding and bouncing off each other.
Ever full of delicious metaphors, Dawkins says she is creating a ‘conveyor belt of dramatic life coming past you’ on the stage. There will be a ‘geography’ to the show, with different actors associated with different areas of the Worcester grounds and noticeably arriving from afar, in the aforementioned boats.
The Merchant of Venice will clearly be able to do justice to its set and location, and to produce highly rewarding drama out of them. It will be a loud, spirited show. For all the dramatic energy, the moments when all conflict or exhilaration on stage stops are even more powerful. At the end of the scene when the deal is sealed, Antonio is left alone, surrounded by empty space. ‘He seeks my life’, Antonio says, with quiet resignation, and we can sense that he is deflated; a vacuum ensues onstage. Be ready for the beauty and tragedy of it, and then the massive happy ending.
Enough – I have praised this show enough. Come all, come early for those few tickets given away at the door each night. All I can say in conclusion is that, soon, Worcester may be known not as the college ‘with the lake’, but ‘the one with the play’.
