Gareth Armstrong, an acclaimed actor-and-teacher and once a member of the world renowned Royal Shakespeare Company, will stage his one-man show Shylock, at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center from today to July 3.
The award-winning production of the 1998 Edinburgh Festival is, indeed, an intriguing exploration of a sensitive and universally debated characterization.
Together with the director Frank Barrie, Welsh-born Armstrong has re-interpreted Shakespeare's most famous and controversial character the Jewish moneylender Shylock from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
Armstrong has played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice numerous times. But John Gross' book Shylock Four Hundred Years in the Life of A Legend, fundamentally changed Armstrong's perception of the character and brought him to see Shylock with a fresh eye.
"Within a couple of pages I was totally hooked. After a chapter or two I began to feel the stirrings of a passion. I thought there might be one or two other sources for me to plunder," said Armstrong.
While he was reading the book and at the same time playing Shylock in Shakespeare's play, a series of questions had popped up in his mind. "Who played the part originally? Did Shakespeare write it with one of his companies in mind? And was it the leading man, or the comic character? I found only speculation. Even more, I wanted to know how he played it..."
Armstrong then delved into researching Shylock, the different stage versions of The Merchant of Venice and the history of the Jews.
The script of the production Shylock gradually took shape in Armstrong's brain.
Although Armstrong plays several characters in the one-man show, the major one is that of Tubal, Shylock's Jewish friend in The Merchant of Venice, who in the original is a minor character, with just eight lines.
But in the Barrie/Armstrong version Tubal is the lead role.
Armstrong says that although Tubal has only one short scene (in the original), there is no one else in the play who shows Shylock any sympathy. "Tubal is crucial," he says.
In the production, with humour and wit, Tubal speaks directly to the audience and recounts much fascinating literary, theatrical, historical and mythological information on the subject of Shylock, Shakespeare, Jews, the theater, history and European culture.
Amazingly, Tubal's narration on all these topics is cleverly inter-woven with the five actual scenes from the original over-20-scene The Merchant of Venice.
Tubal reminds the audience that Shylock, Tubal, and Shylock's daughter Jessica are the only Jewish characters in all of Shakespeare's works.
He adds that Shakespeare himself may never have met a Jew, since most Jews had been chased out of England 300 years earlier, and fills the viewers in on the details of that shocking episode in history.
Armstrong lets Tubal inform the viewers that Shakespeare borrowed his plot for The Merchant of Venice from a 14th century Italian comedy, and that in continental European theater at that time, Jews were often portrayed as comic villains.
There are some interesting details about Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, the bard's leading man for 20 years, and humorous speculation by Armstrong on which actor in the original troupe played Shylock.
Armstrong's Tubal tracks interesting literary trivia about "Merchant" over the last 400 years and finally, humorously, Armstrong puts Shylock on the psychiatrist's couch, where doctor and patient explore what Shylock's real motivation might be for demanding a pound of flesh.
Armstrong revealed that Barrie told him that the most important thing for an actor playing a one-man show "is a passion for his subject."
Armstrong has performed Shylock over 700 times since 1998. The most recent and most thrilling experience for him though was the extended run off-Broadway in New York, where the play was nominated for a prestigious theater award.
"I will stop performing Shylock when I feel that the performance is no longer fresh every time I play it. So far this has never happened and I love every performance," he added.
(China Daily June 28, 2005)
