An extraordinary Franco Branciaroli, in the role of the loan shark Shylock, brings one of William Shakespeare’s masterpieces, ‘The Merchant of Venice’, to the Storchi theater until Sunday, directed and adapted by Paolo Valerio. An extremely current text: ‘The Merchant of Venice’ presents contemporary viewers with themes such as ethical clashes, never-pacified social and interreligious relationships and the more universal ones of love, hate, friendship, loyalty and greed.
Franco Branciaroli, you have performed and also directed Shakespeare’s works several times. What links you to the English playwright?
“Shakespeare is one of the greatest artists in the history of humanity, he writes about theater and, being an actor, I met him and the encounter. Shakespeare’s ‘problem’ is given by the foundation on which the his language. He is not a great playwright but he uses the dramaturgical form already typical of the Elizabethans, with the paradox that sometimes, as in ‘Hamlet’, the text exceeds the form. Furthermore, the plays should be staged in his language. English: Shakespeare at the theater in Italian is 30 percent of what it would actually be”. Is there a common trait that links his apparently distant works?
“They are all tragicomic: ‘Hamlet’ is very funny, ‘Macbeth’ perhaps has a more grotesque comic side. ‘The Merchant of Venice’ fully reflects tragicomic: on the one hand it tightens your heart, on the other it makes you laugh” .
How would you define ‘The Merchant of Venice’?
“A true and very current text. Paolo Valerio’s adaptation focuses on the character of Shylock, a complex and mysterious figure, thirsty for revenge but also capable of arousing compassion in the public. The Jewish loan shark remains imprinted in the imagination for the extravagant and cruel penalty of ‘a pound of flesh’ in payment of a money loan to Antonio. This whole story of a pound of flesh is just the amusement of a rich Jew who wants to mock a merchant as arrogant as he is melancholy. Everyone thinks it’s a joke… while the loan shark is serious. The great literary critic Harold Bloom states that ‘You would have to be blind, deaf and dull, not to realize that this grandiose and equivocal Shakespearean comedy is a profoundly anti-Semitic. And he defines himself as wounded by William Shakespeare: while in the other texts he is the poet of eternity, here he is a man of his time and has ‘bent’ to the anti-Semitic fashion of the time. In fact it is a text of religious war, but the secular, modern public does not notice it. ‘I will satisfy the ancient rancor’, is one of the Jew’s first assertions. A verb not chosen at random, in a joke that immediately highlights the founding theme of revenge against a society that excludes those who are strangers to it.”
