Pacino: A kinder, gentler Shylock
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| By: Israel Insider staff and partners |
| Published: December 3, 2004 |
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| Hath not a Jew ... issues? |
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Writing in the Observer, Ron Rosenbaum takes the new take on Shakespeare's classic to task. "The Shylock that Mr. Radford has given Mr. Pacino to play is an inoffensive, defanged, P.C. Shylock. A Shylock that is less like Shakespeare's Jew than a heroically suffering Everyman, a Brechtian Mother Courage figure of endurance, persisting however put upon. A Shylock safe for civics classes. A Shylock who is more like a somewhat grouchy version of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof."
Indeed, you might as well call this forthcoming film The Usurer on the Roof.
But that's what you get when your producer, Cary Brokaw, announces (in the production material for the film): "This is a play about Anti-Semitism ... and about discrimination, and about prejudice but it is not Anti-Semitic. Shylock is a very sympathetic character. We understand his pain.... "
As Rosenbaum notes, the pain of evading the play's inherent anti-Semitism becomes a bit unbearable.... |
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Sanitizing Merchant: Pacino Plays Shylock Like a Grouchy Tevye
- (The Observer)
12.6.2004
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