The Jew of Malta
Susannah Clapp
Sunday October 10, 1999
Guardian Unlimited
Michael Grandage's production of The Jew of Malta is a quintessential Almeida resuscitation. Christopher Marlowe's prickly drama - much discussed and seldom seen - is punched home with speed and clarity. Stress is laid on its grotesque comic touches and its improbable melodrama. It is played in period, but its speeches frequently ring with inflections of the present. Its world is remote; its actions are bizarre; its sardonic detachment is peculiarly modern.
The dynamic exaggeration of the production is perfectly suited to its material. The Jew of Malta is a vibrant cartoon, not a work of reflection. Set in an historically recognisable sixteenth century, its barbaric extravagance - the central character ends up being tipped into a fiery cauldron - is the stuff of fairy tale. It is studded with gorgeous, reverberating phrases - 'infinite riches in a little room', gloats Barabas as he counts his money in the opening scene - but it never tries to be psychologically probing. The argument is in the action.
This action has some familiar features. An embattled Jewish trader is approached for a loan by lofty Christians. The trader has a daughter in love with a Christian; when thwarted, he goes on to seek a bloody revenge. The Jew of Malta has often been claimed as a model for The Merchant of Venice : Shakespeare's Shylock laments in the one breath 'My daughter! O my ducats!'; Marlowe's Barabas wails: 'Oh girl! oh gold!' But it is never ambiguous or inward in the manner of Shakespeare's play. And in outline, Marlowe's play is repugnant to modern taste. In it, 'Jew' is a synonym for a wheedler, a schemer, a miserly accumulator of vast wealth and a cheater on his fellows. The play goes on to suggest that such a chap might take naturally to arranging myriad murders, including that of his own daughter, into whose porridge he's prepared to drop something nasty.
You could argue that this character is given the most vivid phrases and the most finely turned declarations in the play. You could argue that some of his most outrageous statements are simply coat-trailing boasts, designed to test someone else's reactions: 'Sometimes I go about and poison wells,' he explains, when recruiting a servant. You could argue that he builds up a complicity with the audience by his forthright explanations of his actions, and that he wins their sympathy with his wit and drive. You could also argue that his Christian opponents are exposed as rampant hypocrites. All of these arguments are true. They mean that the play is not an anti-Semitic tract: it is a universal snarl. Nevertheless, the taint of anti-Semitism remains.
As Barabas, Ian McDiarmid takes this on board, and sends it up. He is frisky and flouncing, and brimming with silky contempt: he pats his coffers as he might a lover; he flourishes his sash in camp defiance; he jumps on the walls of the city when he is made its governor. He is over the top - which is to say, he's in character. McDiarmid's triumph - a case of a mannered actor soaring - is helped by Christopher Oram's terrific, apparently simple design of a circle of stone walls that enables a continuous flow of action, and some daring comic effects.
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