Touring to the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland: The Merchant of Venice
Touring to the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland: The Merchant of Venice
Description
The Shakespeare Exchange
The Shakespeare Exchange is the exchange of two productions between Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, and Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA), New York. In the spring of 2024, The Lyceum’s Macbeth (an undoing), written and directed by Zinnie Harris, after William Shakespeare, played at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, TFANA’s home. In winter 2025, TFANA’s The Merchant of Venice will play at The Lyceum.
The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh presents the Theatre for a New Audience production of The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, featuring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock, directed by Arin Arbus.
Shakespeare’s perennially contested play about corrosive bigotry and blinding vengeance is poised at the radioactive intersection of race, class and religion in Arin Arbus’s production.
As Arbus observes, “The Merchant of Venice depicts a divided society saturated with hate and inequity. The world boils with anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, classism, and homophobia.”
The show’s uniquely diverse company evoke a deeply stratified Venice. Its connections to our own grievously fractured world are vivid, stark and startling.
John Douglas Thompson as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, directed by Arin Arbus. Photo by Henry Grossman.
By: William Shakespeare
Season Sponsors
Deloitte and Bloomberg Philanthropies are the 2024-2025 Season Sponsors.
Principal support for Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs is provided by the Bay and Paul Foundations, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund in the New York Community Trust, The SHS Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and The Thompson Family Foundation.
Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs are also made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
