Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon

Tim Carroll opens the RSC’s new season with the dreariest and most sloppily directed account of this play I’ve ever seen. His modern-dress production has neither atmosphere nor style. The young dandies of Venice are charmless blokes in cheap suits, churning out their lines like low-ranking officials at a press conference. Bassanio (Jack Laskey) is a dim minor-public schoolboy who behaves like a down-market estate agent. Antonio (James Garnon) is like a scruffier estate agent.

He is not sad, as he claims, only grumpy; the idea that these two scruffs had an emotional relationship seems laughable. Angus Wright’s Shylock drones his lines with no sense of passion, cunning or anger. Portia (Georgina Rich) is like a pedantic office manager, humourless, graceless and gawky. Nobody seems aware that they’re speaking poetry: the voices are monotonous, poorly projected and have little or no sense of character or feeling. Laura Hopkins’s set is ugly and impractical. The women’s clothes are ghastly and badly cut. Can this be the RSC? Are them that Carroll couldn’t bebothered to bring out? Somebody with authority should have watched a run-through and said this simply would not do.

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