overview :: reviews :: gallery :: credits           The Georgia Straight - The Bond By Kathleen 0liver Publish Date: 14-Apr-2005     Adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Directed by Stephen Drover. A Pound of Flesh Theatre Co-op production. In the Shakespearean canon, The Merchant of Venice is classified as a comedy because it supposedly ends happily. But the play’s anti-Semitic attitude toward Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, has long troubled artists and critics. In The Bond, director Stephen Drover strips away Merchant’s romantic-comedy trappings, foregrounding Shylock in all his fascinating complexity. Antonio, a Venetian merchant, borrows money to help his friend Bassanio woo the heiress Portia. Shylock attaches a condition to the loan: if the debt is not repaid on time, he can claim a pound of Antonio’s flesh. Bassanio wins Portia’s love, but when Antonio’s business ventures fail, Shylock is determined to claim his bond. The Duke of Venice proves an ineffectual mediator, and it’s ultimately up to Portia, disguised as a young male scholar, to rescue Antonio and give him a chance to forgive Shylock. Antonio’s idea of “mercy” is to relieve Shylock of both his possessions and his faith, forcing him to convert to Christianity. This is clearly no happy ending: the once-vigorous Shylock is a broken man, and even Antonio seems stricken with remorse when he learns that his own financial prospects have brightened. Those five characters constitute the entire population of The Bond, but Drover finds clever ways to allude to the roles he’s cut. In Merchant, we watch Bassanio vie with other suitors for Portia’s hand; here, Portia delivers a monologue in which she itemizes the shortcomings of his rivals while handing out copies of their head shots to the audience. And we never see Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, but in voice-over, she bids him a hurtful farewell as he stares at the letter she has left, declaring her abandonment of both her father and her faith. It’s impossible not to sympathize with Shylock, thanks to Todd Thomson’s magnificent performance. Thomson makes every nuance of Shylock’s complicated emotions crystal clear: he is proud, wounded, manipulative, grief-stricken, disgusted by hypocrisy, and eager for revenge. Thomson is constantly in motion, drumming his fingers on his leg, his chest, his account book—or sharpening his knife in gleeful anticipation of executing his contract. As Portia, Sarah Rodgers is lusty, playful, and smart, and she carries off her male drag with authority. Bob Frazer fills the small part of the Duke with inventive physical business: in his first scene, he contemplates affairs of state while working out. Andrew Smith effectively conveys Antonio’s melancholy, but both he and Andrew Vokey, who plays Bassanio too much like a sullen teenager, are less confident with Shakespeare’s language. The production values are spare and elegant. Francesca Albertazzi’s mostly bare set and clean, modern-dress costumes are greatly enhanced by John Popkin’s sculptural lighting design. Popkin’s tight spots and dramatic shafts of light heighten the emotion without ever distracting from the action. Pound of Flesh is a new company dedicated to breathing fresh life into the classics. The Bond is an auspicious debut.                 The Vancouver Sun - Merchant of Venice Without All the Fluff By Peter Birnie     Cutting to the heart of the matter, Pound of FLesh Theatre Co-op does a brilliant job of reinventing The Merchant of Venice. Every word is Shakespeare's in this 75-minute condensation of the ever-controversial play, yet director Stephen Drover's adaptation is a miracle of filtration. Gone is virtually all the secondary romantic fluff that saw Portia persued by too many princes. Enough elements remain, however, for Sarah Rodgers to make hilarious mention of her character's kooky suitors. The vicious battle between moneylender and merchant, SHylock and Antonio, is now so central that The bond brings into sharp focus both the good and bad points of the play. Shylock is an obsessive bastard and Antonio a smug racist, and although Andrew Smith's Antonio is solidly performed, Todd Thomson outshines everyone as Shylock. Canny, cunning, nimble and nasty, this is so complete a portrait of the complex character that it helps highlight his high points as a human being (hath not a Jew eyes?) even in the midst of Shakespeare's sheap pandering to bigotry. Rodgers is right on the money as Portia, especially when disguised as a man for the courtroom "quality of mercy" moment, and the cast is nicely rounded out by Andrew Vokey as a lovestruck Bassanio and Bob Frazer as the DUke of Venice. The staging is simply brilliant. John Popkin's tight lighting precisely defines each scene between blackouts that have the cast neatly shifting in and out the bits of prop or costume (by Francesca ALbertazzi) needed to complete this beatiful miniature. The Bond closes Saturday but definitely deserves to be brought back.                 overview :: reviews :: gallery :: credits