A Merchant of Venice is coming to The Playground Theatre for a limited run from 10 November to 4 December. 

Presented by Shakespeare in Italy, the piece is to be directed by critically acclaimed and award-winning Shakespearian director Bill Alexander. 

Alexander won his Best Director Award for The Merry Wives of Windsor and is all set to direct this all-new version of Shakespeare’s classic. 

The new adaptation is set to be bought to the modern-day era which will focus on the tortured nature of love at the inner core of the play. 

Bill Alexander said: “One can get obsessed with a particular work of art and I confess that obsession is the only way to describe my relationship to The Merchant of Venice.  

“I have directed it twice professionally, twice at drama schools, and taught and lectured on it often. When working on select scenes, it began to occur to me that there was an inner play about a small network of relationships that was the core of the bigger play that wrestles with huge themes of Justice and Mercy, Marriage and Money, Race and Class, and it is this inner core, essentially about the tortured nature of Love, that my production for Shakespeare in Italy at The Playground Theatre will focus on. 

“My version of the play, entitled A Merchant of Venice, focuses on just six key characters whose entangled loves, desires and fortunes hinge on a better understanding of themselves and their relation to each other in the blackly comic world of a modern Venice, the sublime and terrible Serenissima.” 

Casting is to be announced shortly. 

For more information and to book tickets, please click here.