Tryst by Karoline Leach is the final piece to be performed in the inaugural festival from the Chiswick Playhouse productions at the Tabard Theatre, returning from a sell-out run in 2017.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon
What an odd, stark, angry, intelligent Merchant this is! Wholly unlike the last RSC production, Rupert Goold’s spectacular Merchant-of-Vegas gameshow. Polly Findlay sets it modern dress, on a bare stage whose floor and backdrop are gold bars, mirroring the auditorium and making us visible witnesses to the case of Antonio, the shipowning speculator, and his deal with Shylock the Jew. A gilded pendulum swings constantly at stage level; the three caskets descend too, 65 feet from the grid on wires, bald as geometry diagrams – cube, cone, cylinder.