It's clear at the start that Ian Gelder's excellent Antonio has surrounded himself with pretty boys and picks up the tab for their company. But Paul Hickey's balding, Irish-accented Bassanio looks a bit old to be going through "just a phase" in this ambiguous milieu, and his graduation to Hermione Gulliford's attractive, spirited Portia feels a bit too untroubled. There's an excellent touch in the trial scene where Antonio gives vent to a delayed-reaction shriek of terror the moment after the danger has passed. It emphasises the selfless courage beforehand of his love for this friend.
It's good, too, that here Antonio is selfless again at the end, able to smile, albeit wanly, on Bassanio's new happiness.Ian Bartholomew delivers an intelligent, rhetorically nimble performance as Shylock. What it lacks, though, is the requisite emotional intensity and drive. There's insufficient tension in the scene where the Jew leaves his daughter Jessica, who is about to betray him, in charge of their house. When Henry Goodman played the role for Trevor Nunn, he struck Jessica at this point, suggesting that the violence was a reflex of his anxious protectiveness.
There's nothing of that order here.That Shylock's shadow falls over the joy of Belmont in the last act is not thanks to any memory of Bartholomew's characterisation, but because of Isabel Pollen's Jessica, who at the sound of the music weeps with a sudden piercing nostalgia for her own culture.Simply designed, with a wall of revolving doors that look like a stack of gold ingots, the production allows the scenes in Venice and Belmont to dissolve hauntingly into each other, recognising that the latter is no fairy-tale alternative but is also underpinned by commerce.A clear, untendentious reading of the play, there are details that gesture towards a more interestingly subversive reading. The fact that the silver casket here mocks the chooser with a jack-in-the-box head suggests what I've always thought – that Portia's father's will is irresponsible and the casket test is just as likely to land Portia with a canny prig as a suitable husband.To 24 Nov (020-7688 8891). Anthony Blunt's fame rests largely on his notoriety as the Fourth Man, one of the Cambridge spies. But few people know what his work for the Soviet Union actually involved.
