This play, because its villain is a frankly crass stereotype of a Jew, is perhaps the most politically incorrect piece in the Shakespeare corpus. Once a favorite of high school classes and the stage, it has been less and less frequently produced, until today it is something of a hot potato. One does occasionally find a production of it these days, but it seems to be considered a kind of hate crime even to present the play without distancing oneself from it by introducing into the play some note of irony, either showing that Shakespeare didn't mean what he seemed to mean, or else showing that he did mean it, and therefore stands condemned. There are fairly few tricks for doing that that have not already been exhausted -- so most often a producer or director contemplating these choices will come to the conclusion that some other Shakespeare comedy would do just as well.
Like most intrusions of political programs on art, this represents good and its bad impulses and has its fortunate and unfortunate consequences. Certainly the stereotypical villainy of Shylock, the vengeful Jewish moneylender whose loyalties are uncertainly divided between his daughter and his ducats, is not something we should be willing to accept at face value today as either typical of Judaism as a whole or of Jews as a class. At the same time, Shakespeare's audiences were far less worried about appearing (or being) bigoted, and any attempt to paper this over with a revisionist argument or tonality falsifies what Shakespeare was himself doing.
More important than all that, however, is the fact that Shylock's complex villainy is, I would argue, not merely an expression of his racial and religious heritage, even insofar as Judaism was typically misunderstood in Elizabethan England. To see Shylock as "just" a Jew -- as if he were somehow interchangeable with any other Jew -- is to falsify Shakespeare's art, and also to discard the considerable wisdom that can be retrieved from the play. The western tradition has long held to the basic truth that a person's character is unique, and something more than the aggregate of the groups to which he belongs. Whether one believes that or not (I do; many today apparently do not), still one must grant this as part of the suppositional groundwork of most if not all of Shakespeare's character-building. On that basis, a different picture emerges. Shylock's villainy is genuine villainy, well-motivated within the terms of the plot, and requiring no special apology on artistic terms. It is derives, to be sure, partly from the fact that Shylock is a Jew, but not really because of his mere membership in the class. Quite the contrary: it has emerged that, merely because he is a Jew, he has been treated as sub-human by Antonio, the nominal protagonist of the play -- the merchant of the title. Shylock has learned to hate by being hated. He is natively an apt pupil and embraces that hatred with a rare zeal -- not because he is a Jew, but because he is Shylock. It is upon this dark ground of mutual contempt and suspicion that the problem of the plot takes shape, and against it that the theme of mercy emerges. The play is about hatred and mercy, betrayal and forgiveness -- not whether Jews are good or bad. I say this not to vindicate Shakespeare, who may or may not have been guilty of gross bigotry. I neither know that, nor do I greatly care now: the important issue is that the problem does not really violate and corrupt his art.
Given room to spread honestly, free from political encumbrances, the implications of The Merchant of Venice are much more complex than any political agenda that tries to reduce it to a position paper about Judaism. Like all reality, that complexity is ill served by any kind of reductionism -- either the bigotry (and all bigotry is reductionist) that condemns Jews out of hand, or the reductionism that wants to turn Shylock into a hero, merely because he is a victim. As so often, Shakespeare's characters in their particularlity evade their categories and conditions, and any attempt to hammer them down to mere types must falsify the work of the west's foremost dramatist, and vastly diminish our experience of the play.
The end result, however, is that the play has very seldom been done in recent years, though this seems to be changing. I list one production below that is forthcoming in 2005.
Jonathan Miller, 1973: Jonathan Miller was one of the directors and producers of the BBC Shakespeare Plays series, but this is an earlier effort. The cast is fairly astounding: Olivier was widely regarded as the foremost Shakespearean of his day; Joan Plowright is still making movies in a more matronly mode, but was quite imposing in her way even then. Viewers may know the late Jeremy Brett as either Freddy Eynsford-Hill from My Fair Lady, or as Sherlock Holmes in the more recent (1980s) BBC Holmes series. The setting is strangely Victorian -- a kind of Dickensian cast to the art direction -- but all in all, it still works.
The chief issue I have with the film is its editing, which tends to downplay or simply cut anything that could put Shylock into a bad light, with the result that he becomes a much more simply rendered victim than in Shakespeare's more complex and difficult play.
Jack Gold, 1980: This is the entry into the BBC Shakespeare series. It is cleanly performed, though I personally found it less than quite arresting.
Gemma Jones takes the pivotal role of Portia here; she is at least ten years too old for the role (she was 38 in 1980), and she plays it with a tight, almost repressed, reserve. The result is not bad or unappealing, but it puts the romantic story in a somewhat different light. Warren Mitchell's Shylock has less cinematic flair and grandeur than Olivier's, but at the same time it supports considerably more nuance in the characterization.
Viewers of the Indiana Jones or Lord of the Rings movies will be amused to see a relatively youthful (and much slimmer) John Rhys-Davies in the relatively minor role of Salerio.
Trevor Nunn, 2001: In terms of visual setup and cultural milieu this is set in the 1930s in Germany -- the period of the Nazi ascendancy -- and so it is played out among the cabarets and cocktail parties of a decadent Berlin. It does not suffer, however, from the arch exhibitionism of the transpositions one finds in the Luhrmann "Romeo + Juliet" or the McKellan "Richard III".
Despite the potentially tendentious nature of its cultural transposition, the play is generally as faithful to its source as any other, and its performances are good to brilliant. Trevor Nunn's other work in Shakespeare has been solid and visionary -- in particular his "Twelfth Night".
The real standout performance is that of Portia, who is completely captivating and arresting; but she is supported by an excellent cast of other largely theatrical actors. Virtually none of these actors are Hollywood staples -- in fact Portia herself has only this single entry in the Internet Movie Database. In addition, Wiseman's performance of Shylock is sensitively honed -- he is neither lionized nor completely vilified. His Jewishness is not mocked and its traditions are respected; at the same time, he himself is shown as a man consumed with an irrational and excessive hatred. Altogether a stunning performance.
Michael Radford, 2005: I list this mostly in hopes that people will keep their eyes open for it. It's intriguing that people are still working on the play.