Dustin Hoffman About to Tackle Shylock in London

Dustin Hoffman opens as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” in London on Thursday night. Is he scared? Are you joking?

“This is like the Roman Games,” Hoffman told the London Daily Mail. “I’m naked when I do this stuff.”

Hoffman has only himself to blame. When he heard that Sir Peter Hall was leaving the National Theatre of Great Britain to set up his own shop, he called up Hall and asked if it would be crazy for them to try a Shakespeare together.

Hall said it wouldn’t be, but that Hoffman was a little old to play “Hamlet.”

“I said we should start with ‘The Merchant,’ ” Hall told the Times of London, “because Shylock is at once comic and tragic, both of which Dustin deals with very well. He is also very good at playing outsiders, and the whole point of the play is how Shylock stands apart from everybody else.”

Hoffman also stands apart from Hall’s cast in having no experience in playing Shakespeare. Hoffman told interviewers that this would be a dandy chance for the audience to see “a legitimate English Shakespeare company beat the hell out of an American actor.”

Some of the press is under the impression that Hoffman has never even read anything by Shakespeare. The game plan seems to be to keep the expectations low. When a reporter asked for a sample of Hoffman’s Shylock, he did a passage in a Southern accent. “That’s our concept for the show,” said Sir Peter, straight-faced.

The advance sale at the Phoenix Theatre is high--more than $3 million. If the show works on the West End, it may travel to Broadway. But there, Sir Peter says, he wants an all-American cast. American speech, he believes, has an Elizabethan tang that got smoothed out of British speech years ago.

Shakespeare is surprisingly hot on the West End this spring--in commercial productions, not subsidized ones. Derek Jacobi is alternating “Richard II” and “Richard III,” and Alan Bates and Felicity Kendall have just opened in “Much Ado About Nothing.”

The latter production struck the critics as a bit pokey in design, but beautifully acted. Milton Shulman of the Evening Standard liked the way Kendall managed Beatrice’s changes of temperature, from high spirits to cold rage. Irving Wardle of the Times praised Bates’ ability to drop Benedick’s wisecracks “and land on his sniggering former cronies like a ton of bricks. Very satisfying.”

What’s also hot is the campaign to save the Rose Theatre. This is the theater where Shakespeare broke in as an actor and playwright, and the discovery of its foundations is one of the archeological stories of the year. Rather than putting a new office block smack on top of it, its developers, Imry Merchant, are now thinking about suspending an office block over it, leaving the site open. In return, they want to add an additional story to the office block. Stay tuned.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Actor Edward Petherbridge, speaking at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, direct.”