'The Merchant of Venice' review — Shakespeare's comedy possesses a new and recharged ruthlessness
4/5
Shakespeare’s most vexed “comedy”, so-called because of the commingling of couples at the final curtain, has a new ruthlessness worthy of its venal landscape. Heavily cut and reordered so as to foreground the grievous fate that is meted out to the moneylender Shylock and its effect on his traitorous daughter Jessica, Abigail Graham’s staging of The Merchant of Venice jettisons the often-ludicrous closing act, in the process laying bare a play that on this evidence occupies much the same fearsome...