A 19th Century Shylock

Under the shadow of a Venetian palazzo, the figure strides onstage in the regalia of an affluent Victorian gentleman --top hat, frock coat, gloves and cane.

Is this some cultured character out of the pages of Henry James? One of the gentry from The Forsyte Sagal Hardly. It is Shakespeare's "wolvish, bloody" Shylock, in a provocative new production of The Merchant of Venice by London's National Theatre.

The director is the multidexterous Jonathan Miller, who for the past year has been making a name in England as a Shakespearean interpreter. For his Old Vic debut, he has removed Merchant from its traditional Renaissance setting and placed it in that most mercantile of periods, the late 19th century. In his staging, the characters as well as the furniture are ornate, substantial, richly upholstered. The verse is flattened into realistic conversational accents. The play's extravagances are trimmed to the tone and dimensions of a leather-cushioned board room.

Engine of Commerce. The point is as clear as it is contemporary. Money and goods are what the Venetian world turns on. But in Miller's conception, the obsession is shared not only by Shylock and his fellow usurers but also among those who look down on Shylock--Christian merchants, lovers, well-born ladies. All levels of society are driven by the engine of commerce, in marriage contracts no less than in other transactions.

A director who sees the countinghouse at the center of the play cannot take seriously Portia's enchanted realm of Belmont, with its fairy-tale plot and flowery sentiments. Miller treats it as either hypocritical or irrelevant. He turns the casket scenes into occasions for extravaganzas of comic stage business. In the famous lyric dialogue between Lorenzo and Jessica ("In such a night as this . . ."), he makes Lorenzo a pipe-puffing bore and has Jessica fall asleep. Thus he undercuts the romantic element of the play, the key to what Shaw called the work's "humanity and poetry." In a world ruled by money, Miller suggests, poetry and magic have no currency.

In short, Miller takes a one-sided view of the play, but it is a strong side. For one thing, it makes the play more than ever Shylock's play. And as Shylock, Miller has Laurence Olivier--at 62, performing the role for the first time in his career. In keeping with the period setting, Olivier does away with the hooked nose, greasy locks and biblical rantings that have served stage Shylocks down through the centuries. His is a Jew who has come out of the ghetto and into his own, proving that you can teach an old dog nouveau tricks.

Yet if this Shylock is more or less domesticated, he is not quite tamed. His fashionable top hat comes off to reveal a yarmulke on his head. His upper-class speech breaks down into a breathy canine laugh or into red-faced rages of snarling and spitting. Once, after his humiliation in court, his dignity falls away completely and he lapses offstage into a piercing primeval wail of lamentation. Disappointingly to some, this is as near as Olivier comes in this characterization to performing at full classical pitch. Nor does he modulate to softer emotions. He tears angrily through the "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech, from which most Shylocks wring the last drop of pathos.

Like the production as a whole, Olivier makes no easy appeal to the audience's sympathies, but holds to an avid, harshly funny portrayal of the cruelty of human justice and the bitter ironies of human mercy. At the end of Shakespeare's text, Jessica and the merchant, the two characters whose triumphs have been bought at the cost of Shylock's downfall, pause alone and silently onstage before the final curtain. The moment apparently is intended by Director Miller to evoke Shylock, and it works. Such is the flinty power of Olivier's unorthodox performance that his unseen presence dominates the stage at that moment as few actors ever do when they are actually on it.

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