Critics Get Their Pound of Flesh for Hoffman’s Shylock

The quality of Dustin Hoffman’s London reviews as Shylock was a bit restrained.

Hoffman opened Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre in Peter Hall’s production of “The Merchant of Venice.” The critics were respectful, but seemed to feel that Hoffman’s performance needed a dash of something.

Michael Billington in the Guardian called the show “anything but a star vehicle. Mr. Hoffman offers a modest, low-key, small-scale Shylock in a production that, unfashionably, treats the play as a romantic comedy rather than a near tragedy.”

Rather than being in “the heroic tradition of Redgrave and O’Toole,” Hoffman “cuts a humble figure,” Billington said. “His forte is quiet irony.”

Irving Wardle of the London Times found Hoffman “much the most genial Shylock that I have seen. He may vow implacable enmity to Antonio in the first act, but you would never guess it from his welcoming smiles and open embraces.

“The aim is to show him as a good man driven beyond endurance. What does not come off are the directly emotional climaxes, which strain his voice to the limit and substitute rhetoric for (Hoffman’s) priceless capacity for expressing the secrets of a man’s mind through low-key unguarded utterance.”

Nigel Reynolds of the Telegraph thought that Hoffman’s milieu smacked more of Hollywood than of the Venice ghetto. “The Shylock which he had promised would not be the traditional hand-wringing miser turned out to be California cool, a hint unsympathetic and strictly vengeful.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, on winning a special citation Monday night at the 34th annual Obie (Off Broadway) Awards: “I find this award amazing, particularly since I live in Los Angeles. And you know how New Yorkers feel about anything that originates in Los Angeles.”