John Douglas Thompson on playing Shylock at the Lyceum: themes of othering and hatred now 'even more urgent'

Fate took a hand, though, when Thompson was in his late 20s, and living in Connecticut. He had been born in England in 1964, before his Jamaican parents re-emigrated to North America; and by 1990, he had graduated in business studies, and was working as a salesman, with his eyes set on a career in commerce.

One evening, though, Thompson was stood up on a date by a young woman who had wanted to go to the theatre. He went by himself, and found himself watching Joe Turner’s Come And Gone, the second part of August Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle about the lives of African Americans; and the experience of seeing himself, his own people, and his own world portrayed on stage changed Thompson’s life for good. “I knew immediately that that was what I wanted to do with my life,” he says; and he was soon enrolled in a theatre training programme in Rhode Island.

It was the beginning of career that has seen Thompson increasingly recognised as one of the finest classical actors on the American stage, garnering dozens of awards and nominations for roles ranging from Othello to Louis Armstrong, in his acclaimed solo show Satchmo At The Waldorf. Last year, he made his Royal Shakespeare Company debut as Othello at Stratford; and although theatre remains his first love, he also won acclaim for his recent performance as Emmet Till’s Mississippi uncle, Mose, in the film Till, about the horrifying 1950s lynching that helped shape the US civil rights movement.

It wasn’t until 2022, though, that Thompson and director Arin Arbus turned their attention to The Merchant of Venice, one of the most controversial of all Shakespeare’s plays, and one that some feel should no longer be performed, so vividly does it portray the entrenched anti-Semitism of 16th century Venetian society. Thompson and Arbus - who grew up in Los Angeles, as the daughter of actor and photographer Allan Arbus - have a long-standing working partnership, stretching back over 15 years; both found their connection with Shakespeare - after initial resistance to his “posh” classical image - through their work with Jeffrey Horowitz’s ground-breaking Theatre For A New Audience (TFNA), in New York. And both have become increasingly intrigued by Shakespeare’s portrayal of outsiders, and those who are “othered” by society, including Othello and Shylock.

“I’ve always been interested in doing work which is in some way outside of capitalism, and can take some perspective on it,” says Arbus, who spent almost a decade, in the 2010s, working on theatre with prison inmates in New York State, “and I find The Merchant Of Venice to be one of Shakespeare's ugliest plays. I think it portrays a world filled with hate and intolerance; I think the play is an indictment of capitalism, and the extreme hierarchies of wealth and power it creates. And unfortunately, it feels very close to the world we live in now.

“So we are setting the production now, or in the very near future. In the future, because there are specific circumstances in the play that are a little different from our world. And yet, I can imagine a world in which, within a few years, there is a literal ghetto with a wall that Jews, or some other group that is seen as alien, are forced to live in.”

“When we first made this production in 2022,” says Thompson, “we were just emerging from the pandemic; we had seen the death of George Floyd and this huge Black Lives Matter movement, and it seemed like a moment when change was possible. For me, the striking thing about Shakespeare is that even where he is portraying a society that is so full of bigotry - of misogyny, classism, homophobia, racism, as well as anti-semitism - he also portrays those excluded groups with such a terrific spectrum of humanity and poetry. He captures their sense of injustice and oppression, and he enables us to see ourselves in figures like Othello and Shylock.”

And now, following the re-election of Donald Trump? “I think we both feel these themes of othering and hatred have become even more urgent; and that’s what we’re finding, as we prepare for this Edinburgh run.”

Theatre For A New Audience’s visit to Edinburgh is part of an exchange with the Lyceum which saw Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth An Undoing visit New York last year, garnering several award nominations. Unlike much contemporary UK theatre, though, Arbus emphasises that this production of The Merchant of Venice is not “colour blind” in its casting, but highly colour conscious; fully aware of the resonances of casting a prominent black actor as Shylock, and of the profound diversity of the the TFNA company.

“We’re not able to make a production that offers any easy answers to the questions raised by the Merchant Of Venice,” says Arbus. “What I feel, though, is that this is a play that shows how bigotry, injustice and hatred are damaging not only to those who suffer oppression, but to those who do the oppressing. In the very uneasy final scenes of this play, you can feel how the lives of those in power, and even the quality of their personal relationships, are also corroded by it. And that doesn’t make for a neat ending; but it seems to me that it’s more like life.”

The Merchant of Venice is at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 18 January until 15 February