SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY PRESENTS
A MERCHANT OF VENICE
A NEW SIX CHARACTER VERSION OF THE RENOWNED SHAKESPEARE PLAY
ADAPTED & DIRECTED BY THE MULTI AWARD-WINNING
BILL ALEXANDER
RUNNING AT THE PLAYGROUND THEATRE
FROM 10 NOVEMBER – 4 DECEMBER 2021
Bill Alexander, the critically acclaimed and award-winning Shakespearian director, well known for his tenures at the RSC and Birmingham Rep, and his Best Director Olivier Award for The Merry Wives of Windsor, has adapted and will direct an all-new version of William Shakespeare’s notable play, The Merchant of Venice.
This new modern-day adaptation, entitled A Merchant of Venice, which focuses on the tortured nature of love at the inner core of Shakespeare’s play, runs at The Playground Theatre from 10 November – 4 December 2021, with press night on Monday 15 November. Casting and further creatives will be announced in due course.
Bill Alexander, adaptor and director of A Merchant of Venice said, “One can get obsessed with a particular work of art and I confess that obsession is the only way to describe my relationship to The Merchant of Venice.
I have directed it twice professionally, twice at drama schools, and taught and lectured on it often. When working on select scenes, it began to occur to me that there was an inner play about a small network of relationships that was the core of the bigger play that wrestles with huge themes of Justice and Mercy, Marriage and Money, Race and Class, and it is this inner core, essentially about the tortured nature of Love, that my production for Shakespeare in Italy at The Playground Theatre will focus on.
My version of the play, entitled A Merchant of Venice, focuses on just six key characters whose entangled loves, desires and fortunes hinge on a better understanding of themselves and their relation to each other in the blackly comic world of a modern Venice, the sublime and terrible Serenissima.”