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This is one of the most problematic and unlovable of all Shakespeare's plays. As the late and much-missed Jewish reviewer David Nathan once impatiently put it, "In sooth, I am fed up with The Merchant of Venice".
Nathan disliked both the smugness of the Christians and Shakespeare's contentious portrait of a Jew who distributes his grief evenly between the loss of his daughter and his ducats.
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Philip Quast superbly signals the anguish that lies beneath Antonio's buttoned-up homosexuality. At the end, his isolation reflects Shylock's earlier in the play, and you realise with a start that the two antagonists have far more in common than they ever realised.
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