As soon as you step into the ADC for another mainshow, limp, perhaps, with antithalian sag, you snap up your shred of ticket and expect to be left alone with your own expectations. But, pray, what is this? Not only are you wracked with any malice you might nurture toward student Shakespeare, you’re also Atlas-weighted with a programme heftier than Clarissa, freighted with essays on performance history, production decisions and Simon Haines’ theatrical CV.

However, this should not be begrudged. The Merchant of Venice is a play impossible to put on without becoming bogged knee-deep in what readings are and are not suitable for today’s post-Holocaust audience. Director Patrick Garety has, in his programme piece, displayed a welcome sensitivity to these issues, detailing the thoughts developed behind his new mainshow.

There seemed, however, disparity between these meticulously chewed-over choices and the way in which they were staged. Garety claims that to set the play in 1930s Fascist Venice atmospheres a world ‘threatened by the chilling shadow of the Holocaust’. Yet within the cream plush of Portia’s rooms or the ivory-fingered wine bar, such threat became subtle to the point of non-existence. The potency of the contextual set up stopped at the surface-texture; bow ties, baggy pants and extant recordings of 30s jazz were not enough to portray a society on the brink of enacting murderous anti-Semitic policy.

No line of verse seemed to have been engaged with; except for being draped in some thin gauze of pre-war glamour, the many thoughts expressed in the programme failed to manifest onstage. Throughout, the classy gramophone-fare yearned asymptotically toward providing a unique contextual trick. Yet one felt that something more could have been done; a subverted gondola tableaux from Top Hat (1935) perhaps?

The brat pack of Italian hedonists failed to be played with any suitable aplomb; Ned Carpenter’s Antonio and Luke Rajah’s Bassanio provided autumnal staggers of the middle-aged. Only Nick Ricketts’ Gratiano managed to inject some Mediterranean verve into the proceedings, necking his prop wine with full-blooded bravura.

Shylock (Theodore Chester) was powerfully portrayed. His first appearance, quietly sifting through his work while a single overhead beam offered the one particle of light, was unexpectedly simple. Chester’s subsequent handling of Shylock’s ‘villain’ function was measured enough to avoid the damaging stereotype, yet never lost the spite or lonely ‘otherness’ the role requires in simultaneity. The other key part, Portia, playfully balanced the pyjama-party logic of girlish suitor pranks with refined depth. Antonia Eklund proved she was more than a moonfaced beauty pinned up in a slip.

These performances were, alas, the only memorable aspects of what was a somewhat hollow affair. Garety’s The Madness of King George III last term was a big, bland example of a conservative commission, technically faultless yet soulless, and this effort follows suit. The director inscribed himself on this production with invisible ink, palming a sure-thing script and plucking only the ripest of acting talents instead of soliciting any sense of 'edge'. Garety and co. should perhaps try practicing recalcitrance instead of ensuring ticket sales; but perhaps this wasn’t the play with which to do so.