The Merchant of Venice

Dissing any screen version of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice – particularly a screen version which features Al Pacino – isn't easy, but thankfully director Michael Radford (Il Postino) reduces the effort required.

Let's start with the name. When Baz Luhrman put his own name in front of tale of the star-crossed lovers Rome + Juliet it was clearly an attempt to stamp his own name on his ultra-modern adaptation of Shakespeare's classic. But when Radford here puts the playwright's name in front of the play's title, it's meant to have a distancing effect, Radford seeking to shelter himself from the inevitable accusations of anti-semitism that come with almost any production of this play. But, tellingly, Radford strays from the text – pruning it, rearranging it, contextualising it, squeezing what's normally a near four hour play into a still bum-numbing 138 minutes screen time – making this very much his version of The Merchant of Venice.

Defenders of the play point to words here and phrases there within the text, but given that the title page of the play describes it as being 'The most excellent history of The Merchant of Venice with the extreme crueltie of Shylock the Jew towards the said Merchant in cutting a just pound of flesh' such a defence is a little bit like pissing into the wind. You can call it a Christian comedy if that's what it takes to make you sleep easier at night, but the truth is it's a Jewish tragedy.