Ian McDiarmid
in
Players of Shakespeare 2 : Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players With the Royal Shakespeare Company
by Russell Jackson (Editor) & Robert Smallwood (Editor)
Hardcover (August 1988) ISBN: 0521333385
Paperback (December 1989) ISBN: 0521389038

Ian McDiarmid played Shylock in John Caird's production of The Merchant of Venice at Stratford in 1984. In the same season he played the Chorus in Henry V and Tagg in The Party. Earlier Shakespearean work included the title role in Timon of Athens. He appeared earlier for the RSC in 1976 when he played Don John in Much Ado About Nothing and the Porter in Trevor Nunn's Macbeth. He has also appeared in a wide range of modern roles for the Company. In 1986 he played the title role in Marlowe's Edward II at the Exchange Theatre, Machester, where he is joint Artistic Director. Among his films are Gorky Park, The Nation's Health, and The Return of the Jedi.

I digress
Good
Trust the digression not the argument
I shall not pester you with argument
Only digression
You have had a bellyful of argument
            ('Don't Exaggerate' by Howard Barker)

Exulting in the fact that I had been asked to play Shylock in the RSC's 1984 production of The Merchant of Venice, I approached my first reading of the text with some misgivings, but not perhaps for what might be described as the usual reasons.

I was convinced the play was not anti-Semitic and that Shylock was neither hero nor villain. I knew that Shakespeare was not in the habit of being explicit about his creations, preferring ambiguity to a hard line. This, surely, was why the play the play was produced and argued over in so many countries throughout the world, not least in Israel. The central problem, as I saw it, was not so much to divest myself of the paranoias, echoes, concepts, traditions of previous productions and performances, but rather how I might find a way to persuade an audience to do this. Regrettably few people coming to the play would be encountering it for the first time. The problem seemed less to do with my 'old luggage' than with theirs.

It was a relief to emerge from that crucial first reading, invigorated. I have always been attracted to the outsider. Here was his apotheosis; a proud, wronged creature embodying a passion so confused, so strange, outrageous, and so variable, that he seemed as triumphantly alive in this century as in any other. Shylock: the despoiler of conventional morality, on whose altar he refuses to be sacrificed.

I thought I understood now the 'terrible energy', which Edmund Kean was said to have brought to the part. Actor had matched character, volt for volt. Small wonder he left home for his first night, having kissed his wife and child saying 'I wish I were going to be shot.' It was clearly my task to find the raw passion of Shylock in myself. Only then could I engage with the audience and have some hope of displacing the weight of received opinions.

All passion is a risk. So many actors, by the time they are asked to play the great parts, are encased in such self-protecting armour that they are no longer equipped to play them. They lack the breath and the breadth. Instead of embracing the part, they find a way of keeping it at arm's length, of avoiding playing it. It is wrong for an actor to contain a part, he must open himself to all the facets the part contains. The central dynamic is to be found in the collision of the contradictions. I have long thought that the phrase 'creating a character' was an unhelpful one and not really what acting is about. My 'characters', it seems to me, have come about more by accidents of birth than by a process of conscious evolution. The building process -- the ground plans, the foundations, the superstructure, the roof beyond which one may not aspire -- owes much to an over-generalised understanding of Stanislavski and is a by-product of the naturalistic theatre, where the psychology of the personality is the governing force.

Naturalistic techniques are not appropriate to Shakespeare. The plays aim for a distillation of life, not an imitation of it. Naturalism, or theatrical behaviourism, as it may more properly labeled, is a formula, guaranteed to rob words of their value, to limit the actor's means of expression and deny those who people the plays their essential humanity and hence their universality. The act of acting is in itself the articulation of an intellectual and emotional response. Therein lies its vitality.

I never heard a passion so confus'd
So strange, outrageous, and so variable
As the dog Jew did utter in the streets.
'My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice! the law! my ducats, and my daughter!
A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,
Of double ducats, stol'n from me by my daughter!
And jewels, two stones, two rich and precious stones,
Stol'n by my daughter! Justice! find the girl,
She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats!'            (2.8.12-22)

It was in that extraordinary reported speech of Solanio -- a speech alternately heart-rending and hilarious and sometimes both at the same time -- that I found the roots of my performance as Shylock. I knew from my first reading of the passage that somewhere in there was buried the heart of the man. The speech in the weeks and months to come would provide the well-spring for the expression of Shylock's former, present, and future self and my identification with it. The first question, however, was how to effect the transplant. It was, as are all such operations, an intricate and complex one with the strong possibility of rejection at the end of it.

Before rehearsals began, I went to Venice, where I had a wonderful time and found one thing of use. In the Jewish Quarter, Ghetto Nuovo, I was fascinated to see that all the windows looked inward towards the square. None looked outwards to the city and the sea beyond. So, I extrapolated, the Jew was not permitted to look outwards. He had no alternative but to look inwards. Light was shut out. He was left obsessively to contemplate the dark. Less metaphorically, inside were his possessions. His house was itself, and also the sole repository of his property: his wealth ('the means whereby i live') and his daughter Jessica ('the prop/ That doth sustain my house'). Shylock's wealth and his daughter represented his internal life, 'ducats and my daughter!' and 'precious, precious jewels!'. When they were stolen by the Christians, I conjectured, it was as if his identity and his heart had been removed at one stroke, his flesh torn away, his inside ripped out. At hand, to assuage the agony, was a sure provider of short-term relief -- revenge.

I had arranged to spend Christmas in Israel -- motivated again more by the desire to have a good holiday than by any need to research, but knowing that that part of my mind that was already focussed on the play wuld be alive to particular sensations, fragments, impressions to be stored, perhaps only to be discarded. In the city of Venice, the past seems so tangible that any intimation fo the present seems anachronistic. American Express seems the ultimate absurdity. The opposite is true in the state of Israel, where the no doubt necessary (I saw the bomb craters) but still desperate, ugly modernism seems to relegate the great architecture of the past to a series of stage sets for classical revivals, some refurbished, some let go. To glance at Jerusalem's daily newspaper was to participate in the continuing saga of the Jewsih people, battles and treaties, politics and passions.

Then I encountered Mea She'arim, an uncompromising pocket of individuality. Here, about one thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews live the life of the Polish 'shtetl'. Here too live the extremist sect called the Neturei Karta , who do not recognise the state of Israel, as its proclamation was not preceded by the coming of the Messiah. The men dress in long black frock coats, with tieless white shirts and let their hair grow long over their ears into carefully curled ringlets called 'peyot'. Their appearance is based on the fashion prevailing in Poland in the sixteenth century, when a king who wanted to attract Jewish commerce, allowed Jews to wear the black silk coats of the Gentile free-traders in the country. My thoughts turned to Shylock's 'Jewish gaberdine', the distinctive mantle the Jew was permitted to wear but usually disfigured in some way by the compulsory red or yellow badge, 'for suff'rance is the badge of all our tribe'. The coat would indicate the tribe -- Tubal should have one too -- and the badge would be glaring evidence of Christian oppression. Perhaps it should be a hat; not fur-lined or a homberg like the fiercely dignified inhabitatns of Mea She'arim, but something shaming, more grotesque, like a dunce's cap. My visual imagination had been excited, over-excited, perhaps. Were these neo-conservative Jews anything to do with Shylock? Certainly they hailed from Sixteenth-century Middle Europe. Where was Shakespeare's Jew from? Was he necessarily an Italian Jew? To the Christians he was an 'alien', an immigrant in every sense. 'A diamond gone, cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfurt!' did he hail from Germany, I speculated; funnelled, as so many had been, from free cities into imprisoning ghettos where they were to remain, fossilised, for years? The question of whether or not to use an accent had vexed me. It was clear that Shylock's language was unlike that of anyone else in the play. 'And _spet_ upon my Jewish gaberdine.' Was this an indication of an accent or a felicitous misprint? If an accent were to be employed, German seemed quite appropriate, but a bastardised German. All around me there was the evocative sing-song sound of Yiddish, the language frowned on by some but spoken by many who regard Hebrew as a holy language to be used only in prayer. Yiddish: the language of the ghetto, but, no doubt because of its origin, a language of great energy. It has the potency and self-deprecating humour, born of years of oppression. This, I was now convinced, should be the accent of Shakespeare's bastard Venetian.

I allowed the discovery to act on me as I made my way past the synagogues and Talmudic academies, through Zion square, past the Italian Hospital, and back to the Old City and my hotel. The Sabbath was approaching. Soon all work in Mea She'arim would stop and visitors would no longer be welcome. Here I was, an alien in a society whose religion, pleasures, aims, and attitudes were radically different from my own. This was Shylock's state in Christian Venice. But I was only passing through, a voyeur, a tourist day-tripping in other people's lives, an actor. The mind now clogged with impressions, it was time to return to the play.

I had made one stipulation when I accepted the part: the production should be set in Renaissance Venice rather than in a period and a location which might emphasise some of the play's themes at the expense of others. 'Period' or modern dress productions of Shakespeare, while often successful in creating a strong social framework for the plays, can often distort the text and diminish the possibilities of choice for the actor, being an impediment rather than a stimulant to the imagination. There was much to admire in Jonathan Miller's television version of his National Theatre production of the play. A cafe setting seemed quite appropriate for the opening scene but when I felt I recognised it as Florian's on St Mark's Square, it seemed as anachronistic as American Express and at odds with the world of the play. The setting also seemed to demand a naturalism which the verse could not sustain. An attempt to pin down an idea had resulted in a jarring oversimplification.

David Ultz, our designer, understood and was responsive to all this. He wanted to achieve Shakespeare's Venice filtered through his contemporary imagination. It is, alas, a long and bumby journey from the inception to the execution, and while Ultz's design had very strong reverberations for himself and the director, it proved distracting and unwieldy for actors and audiences. the set was a large square room defined entirely by curtains and a carpet, with two 'practical' organs and two 'practising' organists at either side. The room was to serve as both Venice and Belmont. It succeeded in evoking neither. It failed ultimately because it tried to do the work of the text and the actors, rather than provide an architecture or a way of using the stage-space, in which the text and the actors could work. In mistakenly feeling he had to provide an interpretation, he had, unintentionally, created an imposition. The design, however, made some sense in Act I, Scene 3. I could imagine that on the one day he has need of him, Antonio, the merchant, might invite Shylock, the usurer, to do business with him in an opulent salon; a monument to wealth and privilege, emphasising how money had become a form of social power in this mercantile economy. A dunce's cap peeped through the curtained walls. 'Three thousand ducats -- well.' The Jew stands in traditional garb, black silk coat, red hair, ringlets, his beard shaped, as if to emphasise his vulpine features, blinking in amazement at this aladdin's cave of capitalism. The exotic outsider is permitted a glimpse of 'civilised' Christian society. Allowed, for once, to remove his ugly yellow 'badge', he reveals his 'yarmulke' and gleefully sets about subverting the conventional morality, satirising the hypocrisy of 'Christian values' in terms of profit and loss.

SHYLOCK		Antonio is a good man.
BASSANIO		Have you heard any imputation to the contrary?
SHYLOCK		Ho no, no, no, no! My meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient.

the 'good man' appears and Shylock breaks out of the scene (almost out of the play) to inform the audience of his true feelings. In one of the most arresting of soliloquies (lines 41ff), he unashamedly regales us with his loathing of Antonio and affirms his determination to pursue any avenue that may lead to his entrapment.

I hate him for he is a Christian ...
If I can catch him once upon the hip,
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him ...
... Cursed be my tribe
If I forgive him!

Having required Antonio to listen to the theory of usury expounded from the point of view of Judiasm (the 'Laban' speech) liberally sprinkled with self-parody and sexual innuendo, and having been infuriated by Antonio's response, 'The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose' (line 98), Shylock in a moment of brilliant improvisation invents the 'merry bond': a skilful parody of the Aristotelian argument that money is barren and cannot breed money. 'This is kind I offer' (line 142). Antonio recognises the game and responds accordingly,

Content, in faith, I'll seal to such a bond,
And say there is much kindness in the Jew.            (lines 152-3)

In Act 2, Scene 5, we find Shylock on home ground. We set the scene inside rather than 'before' Shylock's house as some texts indicate; a confined space, confining the Jew, his daughter, and his servant. Launcelot is leaving his master for Bassanio. Soon after, Jessica will leave her father for Lorenzo. In our production, Shylock had clearly just come from prayer and meditation, displaying some of his accumulated wealth -- his rings. His relationship with his daughter seemed to me a familiar one. He loved her deeply, was bewildered by her youth and was dependent on her as housekeeper, confidante, and friend. He behaved toward her as he had perhaps behaved towards her mother, the adored Leah, but having to remind himself, perhaps a little regretfully, that Jessica was his daughter, not his wife. Before leaving for the meal, he folds his prayer shawl and gives Jessica his rings (at the time, Jews were not permitted to display any public signs of wealth), almost forgetting to remove his most prized possession -- Leah's turquoise. With a surge of melancholy, he embraces his daughter, unwittingly for the last time. 'Fast bind, fast find' (line 54). Soon Jessica will no longer exist for him, except -- like Leah -- as a memory to burn his heart.

The conversation of Solanio and Salerio, including that great reported speech, prepares us for Shylock's transformation. He enters in the first scene of Act 3, dragging his gown, hair unkempt, half crazed with grief, fury, and exhaustion and encounters the two Christian sycophants. 'You _knew_' (line 24). Suddenly it all becomes clear. Something in Solanio's tone brings everyting into focus. The Christian plot to steal his daughter was a premeditated act.

In early rehearsals I was puzzled as to why Shylock had wasted his breath on these two insufferable Venetians. Later I saw the connection with the first scene. Shylock once again employs 'Christian tactics'. As you treat me, so will I treat you. 'The villany you teach me, I will execute' (line 71). The theft of his money and jewels, the 'murder' (for she was now dead to him) of his daughter would be matched with an act of equal barbarism. These are no more than disorganised thoughts in Shylock's head at the beginning of the scene. By its close and, after what really amounts to a nervous breakdown in front of Tubal, his friend and confessor, he reconstitutes himself and decides to use the Christian law to enshrine an act of murder. The irony and parody we saw in the first scene have now, like Shylock himself, reached grotesque proportions. The Jew's Satire has become the Jew's Drama of Revenge.

We see him next parodying the parody:

Thou call'dst me dog before thou hadst a cause,
But since i am a dog, beware my fangs.

Shylock, treated, spurned, and kicked as a dog, to protect himself, becomes a dog, ending on all fours before the Duke. By the end of the court scene, the Jew's Drama of Revenge has become his Tragedy.

I have chosen not to write in detail about the two 'famous' scenes (Act 3, Scene 1 and Act 4, Scene 1). I think enough has been written about them. Suffice it to say that my approach to them was -- like Shylock's -- emotional rather than intellectual.

That the 1984 Stratford production of The Merchant of Venice was unsatisfactory is a fact with which few will quarrel. My performance was the subject of much controversy. Controversy will never be far away whenever this play is performed. Shylock remains, indiputably, a figure of great energy and passion and like all such figures arouses sharply conflicting emotions perhaps most of all in those who lack his dynamism. He may be a 'dog' but he's no domestic. He disrupts harmony and confuses morality. In that he is perhaps not unlike that other archetypal outsider, the actor. But, I digress.

SPEB