This production of The Merchant of Venice was set very much in the money oriented 1980s, a world of big business, the nouveau riche and yuppies. The 1980s also saw the rise of media intrusion by the paparazzi into their lifestyles.

We decided to mirror this by departing from the usual theatre programme format and providing the audience with a newspaper full of background news stories and gossip about the characters along with editorial commentary about the performance, reviews of relevent books and historical notes about its legal background, for the latter we would like to express our thanks to R.F.J. Simon.

In recreating the programme notes as a set of web-pages, I have had to make a few compromises as somethings that look good on paper need rearranging to be readable on screen. Naturally, the typography and exact layout will depend on the settings of individual web-browsers, but I hope I have managed to portray the concept and style of the original programme.
Simon J. Harris - webmaster