"The Merchant of Venice". Jesus College Shakespeare Project

If there’s one festival in the calendar that you wouldn’t normally associate with The Merchant of Venice, it’s Christmas.

For a start, there’s the Jewish protagonist. But even on top of that, this play is conspicuously lacking in any form of seasonal cheer and goodwill. College traditions, however, stop for no man. The Jesus College tree is up in the dining hall, and it’s squatting right in the middle of the set. What to do? Director Peter Sutton has found the answer, and it comes in the perversion of Christmas into a celebration of commercial transactions. The Jesus Merchant of Venice starts with a boozy seasonal office party in the early 2000s. The partygoers are in full voice, but they aren’t singing Good King Wenceslas. Carols about charity are the last things on their mind. No, they’re singing The Twelve Days of Christmas, a song all about the obscene, mountingly extravagant presents given from one supposed true love to another. And that’s exactly what this play is about: love expressed not as affection but as acquisition. (And those five gold rings nicely prefigure the final entrapment in this most contractual of Shakespeare dramas.)

With the cynical mood well and truly set, this production settles down to being one of the most brutally faithful Merchants you could hope – or fear – to see.

It’s the most polarising of Shakespeare’s plays. Some think it beautiful, radiant and relatable. Others think it ugly, morally bankrupt, and devoid of a single attractive character. Some find it antisemitic. Others find it a damning indictment of antisemitism. Still more see its heroine Portia as a witty, bright young thing in the vein of Beatrice and Rosalind, while many see her as a racist, sadistic manipulator in the vein of Unity Mitford.

As ever, it comes down to interpretation. It’s possible to present the text in such a way that the horrendous treatment of Shylock by his baiters and accusers has you cheering him on to cut Antonio’s heart out in the climactic courtroom scene. And indeed, most modern productions find their sympathies with the unfortunate moneylender. It’s a similar quandary to that presented by The Taming of the Shrew: how do we find a feminist reading in this abusive relationship? How do we make Shakespeare our contemporary?

But, if we’re being honest about what’s actually in the text, not what can be made of it, then we have to admit that the material itself is pretty sordid. As Peter Sutton says in his ever-illuminating programme notes, there are times when we have to accept that Shakespeare did not think like us. He was a product of his era, and rather than bending him to our own modern sensibilities, sometimes it behoves us to tackle him on his own terms, even when they’re distasteful. It’s rare to see a Merchant of Venice that has the nerve to admit this truth, and it’s a fascinating, and fascinatingly unpleasant, experience.

Everyone is cruel in this vision of the play. From the very start, Gratiano’s playful cajoling of Antonio (‘I love thee, and ’tis my love that speaks’) has overtones of homophobic mockery in Ben Gilchrist’s banter-fuelled performance. And when the men first talk of Portia, she is produced, mute and still, like a luxury fondue set on Sale of the Century, for the jocks to gawp at. Three couples get married in the play, but there isn’t even a hint of romance in the air: not a kiss, barely a touch of fingertips. Intimacy Adviser Sophie Cooch must have had an easy job on this one.

The cold absence of romance is never more tangible than in the subplot involving the eloping lovers Lorenzo and Jessica, Shylock’s absconded daughter. Their storyline, usually a sweet, touching tale of rescue from a miserable upbringing to freedom in the meeting of like minds, is here revealed as one of almost immediate disappointment and disgust, as Lorenzo (Leo Bevan playing lazy privilege to the hilt) cheers at the news that he is to inherit half of Shylock’s fortune, and Jessica (Isobel Goldberg making a stellar debut on the Oxford stage) storms off in despair. Their normally radiant and lyrical ‘In such a night’ scene becomes an occasion for bitter recrimination and insults. Jessica accuses Lorenzo of ‘Stealing her soul with many vows of faith, And ne’er a true one’, and he responds by calling her ‘a little shrew’, who ‘Slanders her love’. Thus is one of the few rays of warmth in this chilly play snuffed out.

The coldness spreads through this production like a winter vomiting bug. It’s poised, frozen, remote. Characters retain distance from each other, watch each other with passive appraisal. Compared to other Jesus College productions, it’s static, almost statuesque. Elouise Wills, as Portia, performs with astonishing clarity and style, but always forced to endure a life she hates, imprisoned by a dead father’s senselessly transactional legacy, forcing her to subjugate human emotion to a game of chance. She hates everyone, and speaks with a false grimace permanently plastered across her face. Her gold, silver and lead treasure boxes are kept beneath the Christmas tree, a reminder that she is little more than a reluctant prize for the lucky winner.

As Antonio, the Merchant whose problems cause all the trouble, Arthur Bellamy is a model of verse-speaking. His affection for Bassanio is probably the purest thing in this production, but even that is characterised by restraint. In the face of Shylock’s relentless accusations of his constant antisemitic bullying, Bellamy gazes back in cool disdain, neither confirming nor denying. If ever an actor let the words speak, he does.

And as for Shylock himself, Josh Greenslade is the centre of the whirlpool of hatred that skirls through this play. Picking up the cold, static mood, he performs the role more like an understandably frustrated accountant than a furious Yiddish papa. He comes across as an enigma: why is he so keen to exact revenge on Antonio? Did the theft of his daughter push him over the edge? Did the years of abuse bring him to this crisis? His impenetrability somehow exemplifies both the heartfelt heartlessness of this production and its refusal to take sides. When he dropped his papers at the end of the court scene, and another character quietly removed his kippah in preparation for his enforced conversion to Christianity, I realised just how few little moments of imaginative stagecraft there had been throughout the show. The transaction between actors and audience was business, not pleasure.

Perhaps the only moment of truly humane moral insight comes from Tom Onslow’s Launcelot Gobbo. Shylock’s erstwhile servant is normally a standard Shakespearean clown. But here, abandoned in a world of commerce he doesn’t understand, he becomes a figure of twitching uncertainty. Trying to decide whether he should leave his master, Onslow appeals to the audience for help. Rather than a funny idiot like his namesake Launce from The Two Gentlemen of Verona eight years earlier, Gobbo seems genuinely terrified. And so he should. In a Venice where money is more important than life, a penniless man is bereft of hope.

I don’t think The Merchant of Venice is Peter Sutton’s favourite Shakespeare play (is it anyone’s?). This production perfectly expresses the discomfort, difficulty and cultural differences we encounter when honestly tackling Shakespeare’s text. It may not be as much Christmas fun as Dick Whittington at the Playhouse, but it’s a vital reminder that Shakespeare is not necessarily always for all time. Handle with care.