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Presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. May 13-September 26, 2011. Directed by Rupert Goold. Designed by Tom Scutt. Lighting by Rick Fisher. Sound by Gregory Clarke. Music by Bruce O'Neill. With Jamie Beamish (Launcelot Gobbo), Howard Charles (Gratiano), Susannah Fielding (Portia), Scott Handy (Antonio), Chris Jarman (Prince of Morocco), Aidan Kelly (Solanio), Caroline Martin ( Jessica), Des McAleer (Duke of Venice, Old Gobbo), Jason Morell (Prince of Aragon, Servant), Daniel Percival (Lorenzo), Emily Plumtree (Nerissa), Richard Riddell (Bassanio), Patrick Stewart (Shylock), Christopher Wright (Tubal), and others.
Jami Rogers
Rupert Goold's 2011 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Merchant of Venice was a controversial rendering of the play with a Las Vegas casino setting and a cast that adopted a range of American accents. Plaudits and criticism ranged from Quentin Letts in the reactionary Daily Mail (20 May 2011) predictably calling it a "terrible production" to Kate Bassett in the Independent on Sunday (22 May 2011) finding it to be "audacious and inspired." Many reviewers commented on one feature that had been inspired by the decision to resituate Venice to the US's gambling capital: the transformation of Launcelot Gobbo ( Jamie Beamish) into an Elvis impersonator. Printed responses to this aspect of the production included both disparaging and light-hearted takes on Goold's interjection of twentieth-century music into the action; Letts's remarks dripped with sarcasm, while Libby Purves in The Times (23 May 2011) declared that Beamish would "work his way determinedly through [Elvis's] back catalogue."
In The Independent (24 May 2011), Paul Taylor noted that this Elvis motif provided an "ironic counterpoint throughout" the action, but arguably his evaluation underestimated the carefully constructed use of music within the production. What has been overlooked in much of the commentary on Goold's Merchant thus far is, as Kevin Ewert notes, how theater appropriates cinematic conventions to produce an audio track that foregrounds "synchronized descriptive music that reproduces, explains and underlines every major moment in order to enhance the audiences' emotional response" ("The Thrust Stage Is Not Some Direct Link to Shakespeare," Shakespeare Bulletin 29.2: 170). Far from being a superficial or unnecessary element, Rupert Goold's use of Elvis Presley material-along with other music choices-was designed to calibrate audience's collective response to this...