The Merchant: A Sydney Document

This performance text will re-contextualise the Merchant of Venice in the recent GFC effected money markets of Sydney, with its banking, futures trading, financial and legal fraternities, its thriving Eastern Suburbs Jewish community and its ongoing backdrop of glorious harbour water ways and contemporary and modernist architecture. This documentary exploration of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice will juxtapose and dramaturgically incorporate a number of interviews with Sydney professionals and inhabitants who hold similar positions with the key characters in the play. The interviews used will be specific to the play’s themes, including: the financial sector and money lending in contemporary Sydney, commercial law and the loss of trade, employment positions and financial pressure in post GFC Sydney, the position of Jewish culture in society, a contemporary reflection on anti-Semitism, Christian/Jewish rivalry, gender and the law (female barristers in particular) and architecture. It will also have as its backdrop Circular Quay and the Courts district, with its potent combination of stunning natural beauty and ongoing Asian and global connections, which continues to lure the brightest and hungriest for business and financial power to the harbor city. Merchants (The Merchant of Venice_Sydney Document) will employ dramatic storytelling and a documentary collage/essay style, using interview based research and documentary material, alongside sound and media excerpts. In some cases this will be used to create a verbatim form ‘collage’, juxtaposing interview material with the original Shakespeare test. In other areas these interviews may be dramatized in ways that will take viewers or listeners to the heart of these Sydney characters, and serve to illuminate the themes and dramatic action of the original Shakespeare text. At the same time the script will tip its hat to the chicanery of original Venetian comedies on which Shakespeare based his text and allow these style elements some space. The style in which the work will be dramatized will also be influenced strongly by the Radio-Phonic possibilities of documentary interviews and editing. It will seek to incorporate this either in a fully recorded form or as one style of the dramatized performance form. Merchants (The Merchant of Venice_Sydney Document) will continue Catherine Fargher’s AWGIE award winning multi-layered dramatic narrative and inter-textual styles, building on her documentary, dramatic and comic Radio Play scripts The Violin Player, There Waits the Wolf and The Woman Who Knitted Herself a Child. It will also utilise the radio-phonic and directing expertise of Prix Italia award winning freelance ABC Radio producer and director Christopher Williams.