Director Anne-Louise Sarks Takes On A Great Shakespearean Conundrum

Director Anne-Louise Sarks is facing one of the biggest undertakings of her career to date. Not only is she preparing a production that will travel further and be seen by more people than any of her previous shows, it's also a prestigious debut with Australia's premiere purveyors of the Bard: Bell Shakespeare. But beyond the pressure of a 27-theatre tour, or the high expectations of Bell's Shakespeare-savvy punters, her greatest challenge may, in fact, come from the play she'll be presenting.

The infamously tricky faith-centric comedy, The Merchant Of Venice, has an uncanny, evergreen knack for reflecting the muddled morality of the world, but it's a text that calls for courageous and sensitive handling. As its narrative centres on a ruthlessly pursued debt, this play speaks to the corrupting effect of wealth while calling into question the values that should hold more worth than tawdry currency. These familiar economic themes are not so much malleable to the times as they are unerring - it seems fated that The Merchant Of Venice's warnings about the malignancy of the rich will always, if you'll excuse the pun, be on the money. But alongside this fiscal philosophising is a more problematic idea — one that has been hotly discussed for centuries.

Difficult questions linger over this play's most pivotal and passionately debated role: Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who famously demands a "pound of flesh" to settle a debt, but ends up being stripped of his fortune, family, and even his faith as he is finally forced to convert to Christianity in the play's final scenes. The conundrum of this character is multi-layered. Is Shylock a villain who eventually gets his rightful comeuppance or a victim persecuted for his religion and subjected to a biased trial? Is Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock a subtle attack on the anti-Jewish sentiment rife in Elizabethan England, a kind of veiled plea for tolerance, or was it deliberately, unashamedly anti-Semitic? These questions have been endlessly pondered by scholars from HSC to PhD, but it continues to be a point of complex contention that must be carefully confronted by directors tackling The Merchant Of Venice.

Some choose to appeal to purists by contextualising Shylock within the 16th-century anti-Jewish mentality; Judaism had been outlawed in England for several hundred years by the time The Merchant Of Venice was penned in the late 1500s. Others have sought to reposition the audience's empathy for this character, appealing to their sympathies rather than their schadenfreude. Some have even opted to have this role spoken entirely in Yiddish — a practice pioneered by American-Jewish actor Jacob Adler in the early 1900s — to galvanise the sense of isolating otherness faced by Shylock.

"The main thing for me was establishing the great humanity of Shylock."

Sarks' solution has been to focus on the secular universality of this character, who will be played in this new Bell Shakespeare production by three-time Helpmann Award-winning actor Mitchell Butel. "The main thing for me was establishing the great humanity of Shylock," she explains. "He's not a comic character, nor is he an outright villain. And my way of interpreting his journey is that things go absolutely too far, but they are a direct result of the kind of history and persecution this man experiences. And I think when you position the play in that way, then you have the ability to ask some really complex questions about the way we treat people now. It allows a kind of contemporary resonance to be felt."

Sarks has sought to amplify the most relatable facets of Shylock's character, even taking certain corners of plot usually limited to a verbal description and exchanging them for played-out, fully staged action: "We've taken these extra steps to create that empathy and to shift the perspectives in the play, because things get very ugly in that courtroom. Things go further than they need to. They go beyond the law and I really want my audience to question that and not be blindly accepting of what is usually played as a victory."

Fundamentally, there's no avoiding the fact that Shylock is a villain, within the context of this play; Shakespeare goes out of his way to anchor his wickedness to his faith, but even if you were able to remove the scathing Jewish stereotype, you would still be left with a man bent on a disproportionate level of revenge. The way the term "Shylock" has become common parlance for a loan shark, and "pound of flesh" has come to mean a mercilessly claimed debt, reveals how indelibly etched Shylock's nature is on our collective, Western culture, in spite of its offensive undertones. Sarks does not wish to absolve this character of his less flattering personality traits, but she is embracing a greater level of moral ambiguity than you might usually find in The Merchant Of Venice.

"There's really no way to make the play an allegory for something else. I think that the language, the poetry, the kind of debates with the role of faith in society - it's utterly entrenched inside this beautiful language. So, I never felt like transplanting the play was an option," she admits. "This production almost has a fairy-tale look to it at certain points and that was a very deliberate choice. We're saying to our audience, 'This is a story - we will tell it to you and you will invest all your imaginary forces just as we have.' I'm hoping that by allowing that element of theatricality and storytelling to the fore it will open up this production as a provocation, where we're able to question what we're seeing and how these characters act."

Reconciling the thorny catch-22 of Shylock’s character, liberating him as an individual and not as an embodied history or a toxic caricature of Jewishness, is a consuming responsibility. But Sarks has been cautious in not allowing this task to completely eclipse the nuanced drama that abounds in this play. Balancing these capricious elements is no easy task, but it’s this innate difficulty that has excited the director. “There’s such a rich range of emotion – it’s funny and full of heart, absolutely romantic and very touching, but then at the same time, there is this murkiness. You can have a moment of total joy on one page and then on the next, a tragedy,” Sarks observes. “The truth is, on some level, I had no idea how to handle that challenge when I reread the play. But that made want to run towards it all the more.”

Anne-Louise Sarks directs Bell Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, 19 — 30 Jul at Arts Centre Melbourne, 24 Oct — 26 Nov at Sydney Opera House, and regional venues across Victoria and New South Wales 11 Jul — 21 Oct.