All the audience’s sympathy is enlisted for Tracy-Ann Oberman’s magnificent Shylock. She starts out businesslike and matter-of-fact, and a tiny bit complacent, with a slight Mitteleuropa accent.  We feel for her as her daughter Jessica (Grainne Dromgoole) is taken from her by her laughing enemies, and the moment she finds that Jessica has not only stolen the precious ring Shylock’s husband gave her, but then carelessly exchanged it for a monkey (“I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys”) is almost unbearable.  

The Christians are a pretty unpleasant bunch, and again Shakespeare had already done most of the work for Larmour. Bassanio (Adam Buchanan) is shallow, greedy, lazy and entitled.  Antonio (Raymond Coulthard) is bigoted, and sexually obsessed with Bassanio. 

Gratiano (Xavier Starr) is a noisy and nasty racist who – in one of the few departures from Shakespeare’s script – arrives drunk outside Shylock’s house, urinates in the doorway, and sings a dreadful anti-Semitic song thought to have been written in 1939 by a neo-fascist Tory MP called Maule Ramsay, to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory: “Land of dope and Jewry, Land that once was free, All the Jew boys praise thee, Whilst they plunder thee.”