When you read this I’ll be in Salonika, a city that lost almost all the Jews who once made up more than half its population, has two synagogues where there were scores, and hasn’t even a proper Jewish cemetery, since the SS used its tombstones for swimming pools. And there I’ll be trying to forget much of the opener to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new season: a Merchant of Venice that signally fails to acknowledge the feelings that seethe and the still-topical concerns that bubble away in this difficult, off-putting, fascinating play.

Perhaps I’m over-influenced by the memory of Trevor Nunn’s brilliant National Theatre production in 1999.

I just can’t forget Henry Goodman’s Shylock, a man who had his faults but whose religious faith and sense of history were rich and deep. Compare him with Angus Wright, who here exudes mild pleasure when he comes to the speech about Jacob’s sheep but spends the play looking so impassive and sounding so arid that it must be a deliberate choice. Maybe he is suggesting that Shylock has learnt to mask his heart to survive in bigoted Venice; but couldn’t he be more exercised when, for instance, Tubal tells him that his daughter Jessica has sold the ring his wife gave him?

But then constraint is everywhere in Tim Carroll’s production, down to the Prince of Morocco, who seems remarkably unmoved when his failure to choose the right casket means that he loses both Portia and the right ever to marry, and Launcelot Gobbo, an inexplicably upmarket servant and a less explicably unfunny clown. Are the dark modern suits largely to blame? The Christian faction might be at a conference of hedge fund managers, though one convening at a duller economic time than our own.

As for Georgina Rich’s Portia, she resembles and may be meant to resemble a cool, collected city executive, or perhaps Harriet Harman in a sedate moment at the dispatch box.

The production has its merits, including clarity of diction and narrative fluency and, in spite of the floating hands that bizarrely appear in a long glass strip during the casket scenes, lack of pretension. Carroll also resists the temptation to manipulate our feelings by caricaturing the play’s antiSemites, though that would be more refreshing if he did anything much else with them. Jack Laskey’s affable Bassanio sometimes excepted, they are charmless without being interestingly or purposefully charmless.

Just for a moment I thought that Wright, usually such an impressive actor, might burst into life when, poised with his knife over James Garnon’s prone Antonio, he is deprived of revenge. But he had never seemed vastly to want it before, and now he wryly accepts his ruin. So where’s the love, the hate, the terrible energy that can make the play so gripping? Nowhere much.

Box office: 0844 8001110

Explore Stage

• Theatre

• Comedy

• Opera

• Dance

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010