The setting for this modern day retelling of
Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is the money belt south of Manchester around
Alderley Edge. Here live, in conspicuous affluence, the main protagonists:
Strulovitch, a well-heeled Jew; Plurabelle, a wealthy heiress with a celebrity
lifestyle; and D’Anton, friend and factotum to Plurabelle and implacable enemy
to Strulovitch, based purely on a disagreement over the latter’s planned
development of a local gallery to exhibit Jewish art.
Plurabelle and D’Anton are casually anti-Semitic;
Strulovitch while not religiously devout is culturally mired in his faith,
content to field prejudice and return it with interest. Not anti-Semitic
(despite his Nazi salute style goal celebration) is Plurabelle’s and D’Anton’s
friend Gratan, a big footballing fish in the small pool that is Stockport
County. In fact he has a hankering for Jewish-looking girls, currently centred
on Beatrice, Strulovitch’s sixteen (but going on twenty-five) year old
daughter.
The scene set, enter Shylock.
Strulovitch meets him in the cemetery and,
unfazed by the presence of a fictional character from a four hundred year old
play, invites him back to the house for a meal and to stay a few days. For
Strulovitch it is an opportunity to quiz his guest on his ‘recent’ experience
and to seek advice on his own predicament. For Shylock it is a chance to
reflect on and explain a point of view the bard omitted from his play.
The plot in Cheshire’s ‘Golden Triangle’
develops along Venetian lines. Barnaby (Plurabelle’s lover) wants something
Strulovitch has; D’Anton seeks to get it and makes a risky bargain that
includes Gratan, Beatrice and an unwise forfeit. Will it end familiarly or will
there be a twist this time?
There are some wordy bits around the Jewish condition
but Jacobson uses words very well, and there are plenty of mannered comedic
episodes too. A familiarity with Shakespeare’s play will help to appreciate the
sense of unfolding fate (I refreshed my schoolboy memory with a quick browse of
Lamb’s Tales) but the story can stand alone to give a modern and more balanced,
though not anodyne, picture of Jewishness in contemporary western society.
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