As always with Shakespeare's Jew play - and by the end of this month there will have already been three major productions this year - you hope the director finds a way to justify Shylock's revenge. But of course, there is no justification for cutting a pound of flesh from a living man's body, so inevitably solace can only be found in the behaviour of bad Christians (now there's a title for a play) - that and what dignity the actor playing Shylock brings to the role.

Thankfully Jonathan Pryce brings none of his Fagin - of 20 years ago - to his Shylock. Crucially, he speaks with no Jewish lilt, and nor does the actress playing Shylock's daughter Jessica, played here by Pryce's real life daughter Phoebe. The Jews in Jonathan Munby's solid but hardly inspired production wear caps of vivid red and mandatory circles of yellow on their clothing. But in all other respects there is little to distinguish them from the gentiles, which at least highlights the injustice of the Jews' status within Venetian society, revealed most brutally when Dominic Mafham's otherwise extremely likeable Antonio grabs Shylock by the beard.

The most telling moment in Munby's production comes not in the court scene, which oddly generates only a fraction of the required tension considering that this is where Shylock resolves to cut the flesh, but later in the celebratory garden scene.

It is here where the play traditionally changes mood, from the drama of seeing Shylock's murderous intent foiled and then being condemned by a reprieved Antonio to become Christian. Here we see Shylock's baptism in all its solemn pomp, a ceremony that appears to also be played out in the head of Shylock's now guilt-ridden daughter Jessica who, let it be remembered, swapped the ring that once belonged to her mother, for a monkey (and not the cockney kind, which might have been more forgivable). It's the least that she deserves. Such are the tiny moments of consolation in Shakespeare's Jew play.