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You could take Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and stage it exactly the way it was done in the 16th century, in Elizabethan English and Venetian costume, and it would still work. Its poetry is immune to fashion, and its most memorable characters, the Jewish moneylender Shylock and Portia, the rich girl who starts out as the prize in a Kuwarta O Kahon-type marriage competition and later becomes a lawyer in drag, continue to fascinate. Such a production would be of interest to English majors, serious theatergoers, actors, and…uh…those groups.

Or you could take The Merchant of Venice in the eloquent Tagalog translation by Rolando Tinio and put it in a different context, one that turns its most famous, most problematic quality—its anti-Semitism—on its head. Situate it in a time and place that weaponized its art to justify genocide. Set it in Nazi Germany. Use recent history and its present-day reverberations (anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia) to give it a new and powerful charge. Take Shakespeare’s comedy (it contains a wedding and a supposedly happy ending) and twist it into something its author may not have intended for it to be, but which history turned it into.

In Tanghalang Pilipino’s production of Rody Vera’s Der Kaufmann (“merchant” in German), this comedy is hilarious only to the Nazis. We are riveted, unsettled and horrified as Nazi officers and guards force their Jewish prisoners to perform Shakespeare’s play. A gay man is arrested and the text of the play shoved into his hand—he must play Antonio, the titular merchant whose love for Bassanio moves him to guarantee a loan from the reviled Jewish moneylender Shylock. On pain of torture, a Jewish father must portray Shylock, who lends Bassanio 3,000 ducats on one condition: If the debt is not repaid on time, the penalty is one pound of Antonio’s flesh.

Bassanio, as performed by a Nazi officer, pays court to the blonde heiress Portia in perfectly Aryan Belmont. A Jewish prostitute is press-ganged into playing Shylock’s daughter Jessica (Shakespeare invented the name, apparently), who elopes with the gentile Lorenzo, played by a Nazi officer. Each actor essays two roles connected by the text, and as the play goes on these roles merge cruelly, brilliantly, into one. The play constantly twists and turns on itself, questioning Shakespeare, questioning history, challenging our fond notions about the theatre. You do not need to be familiar with Shakespeare’s play to grasp the persecution of the Jews or the sadism of the Nazis. All you have to be is human. (Well, an educated human with some knowledge of the Holocaust.)

Is it still Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice when it is neither comic nor romantic, when Portia is a self-satisfied bitch and Shylock is an object of pity and not revulsion? Yes, absolutely. It’s become cliché to describe Shakespeare as “universal” and “timeless”, but how else to convey the fact that the same lines can be interpreted in a radically different manner and they would still be accurate in their representation of human character?

The cast take questions from the audience.

Staged within the claustrophobic confines of Tanghalang Huseng Batute at CCP, with the actors close enough for the audience to touch, Der Kaufmann has a thrilling urgency. Rody Vera and Tuxqs Rutaquio direct the fine cast, which includes the excellent Lou Veloso as Tubal and the Duke, and the hardworking Aldo Vencilao, hilarious as Lancelot and Aragon and chilling as Solanio.

In one of Rody Vera’s inspired twists, the Jewish father (Jonathan Tadioan) playing Shylock is struck senseless and his wife is forced to continue in his stead. A female Shylock in a play that features Portia as a man, staged 400 years ago by an all-male cast (so Portia was played by a man playing a woman playing a man)! As the Jewish mother, Racquel Pareño starts out reading her lines haltingly, fearfully, but as the Nazis taunt her, her rage and anguish pour out in a shocking torrent. She utters those famous (translated) lines—”If you prick us, do we not bleed…if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”—with such raw emotion that all our hairs stood on end as if we’d been plugged into an electrical socket.

Rody Vera is on a roll—this year so far he’s written Norte, Hangganan Ng Kasaysayan for Lav Diaz, Badil for Chito Roño, and now this. We are privileged to witness the work of an artist in his prime.

Tanghalang Pilipino’s Der Kaufmann (The Merchant of Venice) goes onstage on Saturday, 19 October, at 3pm and 8pm. Tickets cost Php600. For tickets, call TP, telephone (02)832.1125 local 1620/1621 or go to ticketworld.com.ph.