A comedy is never just a comedy, and a tragedy is never just a tragedy, in Shakespeare. But if there is a comedy where cruelty crawls like a poisonous snake it is “The Merchant of Venice” and it is no coincidence that, depending on who handles it, it is possible to make some colors stand out over others. The adaptation produced by the Teatro Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia together with the Bresciano Theater Center and the Teatro degli Incamminati, expected from today to 19 May at the Teatro Manzoni, chooses, at least for the eye if not for the mind, to remove those colours.
It is in a black and gloomy Venice, very similar to a noir setting albeit in the 16th century, «where the very reflections of the water on the walls appear ambiguous and fleeting», that the story adapted and directed by Paolo Valerio moves, with a veteran like Franco Branciaroli in the essential role of the Jewish loan shark Shylock. «A different Merchant explains Valerio because alongside the story of the rivalry between the Christian shipowner and entrepreneur Antonio (played by Piergiorgio Fasolo, ed.) and the Jew Shylock who takes the opportunity to give him a loan without interest but with a pound of his flesh in pledge in the face of the eventuality of a naval disaster, there are amorous paths and wiles. Our Merchant is also a female comedy, where the role of Portia (Valentina Violo, ed.) is fundamental, as is that of the other women who move the entire story to its epilogue.” The comedy contains multiple plots and as many readings that cannot be explained in a few lines «beginning, Branciaroli specifies, with the theme of the religious war between Christians and Jews of the time which, today, a completely secular audience does not grasp, and indeed concentrates on the financial history”. The role of Shylock appears in a well-defined light: «Shakespeare’s pen was evidently dipped in anti-Semitism, explains Franco Branciaroli, so much so that the Bard’s major historian, Harold Bloom, always detested this work in which, he said, Shakespeare ceased to be man of eternity to become a man of his time.” A time where the established power was Christian and the Jews were kept in the first ghetto ever created in the world, that of Venice. A time when it was normal to hiss anti-Semitic comments to generate laughter in the audience. However, Branciaroli continues, Paolo Valerio’s «Different Merchant» proposes «a proud Shylock, never awkward as he is often represented, who opens and closes the piece and who clearly says he hates the Christian Antonio. But the fact that he is also a victim of the forced conversion to which he will be subjected, therefore in some way arouses our compassion.”
A Shylock who occupies the stage as an individual and not as a paradigm of his people: «The Shylock of our staging explains the director Valerio is an individual, an obvious villain as the famous Richard III can be, but just like Putin he is a man evil who does not represent all Russians, Shylock does not represent all Jews.”
Finally, the theme of language indelibly marks the comedy: «Shakespeare’s text here is alternately calming and disturbing, explains Valerio. In Shylock it’s a dirty language: for example he never talks about money but about money, in the singular».
