Word: shylocking
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...uncanny command of stagecraft, that arsenal of small gestures and bits of business that an actor uses to establish his character for the audience. In the final scene of a 1962 production of The Merchant of Venice, Scott, playing Shylock, held a handkerchief belonging to his daughter Jessica. The production was staged outdoors, near a lake in New York's Central Park, and every night a gentle wind blew across the stage. To signify Shylock's loss of Jessica, Scott simply released the handkerchief, and the wind carried it away. In O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms...
...early '60s, Scott had won his second Oscar nomination for The Hustler?and refused it. He had been acclaimed for his Shylock in another Papp production ("the greatest acting experience of my life"), almost stolen the show from Peter Sellers in Strangelove, and played in Desire Under the Elms opposite his wife Colleen. They now had two sons, but as his talent matured, his personal life began to crack. Everything broke open in 1964, after Scott left for Rome to play Abraham in John Huston's behemoth film The Bible...
...script and staging mesh at a truly first-rate level: Ingmar Bergman's production of Hedda Gabler and Jonathan Miller's of The Merchant of Venice, both for the National Theater. Yet even these are star vehicles, Hedda for Maggie Smith, and Merchant for Laurence Olivier as Shylock (at least until recently when a thrombosis forced him off the stage for three months). In most of London's other notable productions, playwrights and directors more or less suffer stellar eclipses...
...this Shylock is more or less domesticated, he is not quite tamed. His fashionable top hat comes off to reveal a yarmulke on his head. His upper-class speech breaks down into a breathy canine laugh or into red-faced rages of snarling and spitting. Once, after his humiliation in court, his dignity falls away completely and he lapses offstage into a piercing primeval wail of lamentation. Disappointingly to some, this is as near as Olivier comes in this characterization to performing at full classical pitch. Nor does he modulate to softer emotions. He tears angrily through the "Hath...
...audience's sympathies, but holds to an avid, harshly funny portrayal of the cruelty of human justice and the bitter ironies of human mercy. At the end of Shakespeare's text, Jessica and the merchant, the two characters whose triumphs have been bought at the cost of Shylock's downfall, pause alone and silently onstage before the final curtain. The moment apparently is intended by Director Miller to evoke Shylock, and it works. Such is the flinty power of Olivier's unorthodox performance that his unseen presence dominates the stage at that moment as few actors...