SOURCE: Smallwood, Robert. “Shakespeare Performances in England, 1999.” Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 244-73.

In the following excerpted review, Smallwood describes Trevor Nunn's production of The Merchant of Venice for the National Theatre as brilliant, and praises the principal actors, particularly Henry Goodman's Shylock.

There was no such sense of a one-man show about the National Theatre ensemble's second Shakespeare of the year, a production, again directed by Trevor Nunn, of The Merchant of Venice at the Cottesloe Theatre, played in traverse mode. Hildegard Bechtler's design placed the Venetian scenes of the play in the middle of the traverse in a Cabaret world of thirties dance music, elegant café tables on a black and white chequered floor, much drinking of champagne, the noisy young men of the Christian community in an impressive range of well-cut suits and blacks such as Lancelot Gobbo doing the menial jobs (again the rejection of the ‘blind...