Edinburgh Fringe 2025
A Pound of Flesh
Arbery
Genre: Drama, Historical, Theatre
Venue: The Space on the Mile
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
This is a look at The Merchant of Venice but Martin Foreman has other plans. He wants to take the brutality of the ‘Pound of Flesh’ to its tragic conclusion and use other plays by Shakespeare and a bit of poetic licence to make up a new ending.
Review
Five chairs, five actors in modern garb, except one of them, a woman with silver hair, is wearing a long, seemingly medieval dress, a metal belt. These decisions seemed a bit arbitrary to me, why not find a timeline and stick with it, why make, as it turns out the character of Shylock, look as if they have come from a different time than the others? Or perhaps that was the thought behind it?
These are our actors, giving us excerpts from a play that many of us know very well: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. But this is the Fringe, this is a shorter version with a new premise: what if Portia never makes it to Venice, who will save Antonio then? Alongside it asks other questions like, why does Bassanio woo Portia and what is the relationship between Antonio and the young man. We soon find out that Antonio (Gabriel Bird) obviously loves Bassanio (Ollie Hiemann) as more than just a mate and that Bassanio only wants to marry Portia for her wealth. This is not new, Shakespeare can be interpreted that way and has been before.
Chilling are the scenes between the men and Shylock, here played with great strength and power by a woman, Danielle Farrow. She speaks the famous lines beautifully, about how badly she has been treated as a Jew, who is a human being after all, and how still they come to her to borrow money. “Good Shylock?” she spits. Portia is played by Ruby Rutherston, shining and comfortable in an elegant trouser suit. We never meet her previous suitors, she is bored and frustrated with her situation. All this changes when Bassanio appears, the two had met before and find they are very attracted to each other – a happy ending seems possible. The two young actors are touching in their sudden sympathy and both manage the demanding lines with convincing verve, even if sometimes losing the rhythm, swallowing or mispronouncing a word or a syllable.
A happy ending as written by Shakespeare – no, Martin Foreman has other plans. He wants to take the brutality of the Pound of Flesh to its tragic conclusion and use other plays by Shakespeare and a bit of poetic licence to make up a new ending. Blending Romeo and Juliet’s tragic drama into this, Portia dies before she can come and help with an act of lawyerly cunning, some of her famous lines are given to Michael Robert-Brown who as Doge and Messenger takes on all necessary further parts. I felt the importance of the speech about The Quality of Mercy did not receive the weight it needed. Eventually the speech falls on deaf ears, Shylock the Jew will not accept mercy, Antonio must die. Alone, Bassanio and Antonio avow their love for each other. An unexpected twist ends the play as the young man will not live without his friend and his new wife. Antonio is offered a double suicide option by his friend, a twisted nod to the bottle of sleep draught and the dagger that kills the lovers in Romeo and Juliet, but he chickens out. He then kisses Bassanio’s dead mouth fervently. We see no more. How Shylock eventually takes the cut nearest the heart is left to our imagination.
Today making a Jewish character hard and unforgiving sends chills down the spine of all who watch. To perform this play in 2025 is a daring act, to make it even harsher is a brave decision. Daring work.
