Selected cast
- Antonio
- Shahbaz Sarwar (DK/Pakistan)
- Bassanio
- Marco Marc (DK)
- Portia
- Wanjiku Victoria Seest (DK/Kenya)
- Shylock
- Michael Omoke (DK/Kenya)
- Nerissa
- Camilla Londorf Rosenkrands (DK)
- Jessica
- Afua Atingo Asare-Nyako
Production dossier · debut-era work
The Merchant of Venice
Contract. Spectacle. Judgment.
A Shakespearean world re-entered through a modern stage language — ceremony, debt, desire, public speech, and the dangerous theatre of law.
Framing
The Merchant of Venice appears here not as antique reconstruction, but as a living argument: law and mercy, intimacy and performance, public judgment and private risk.
ACT’s production keeps the bodies, costumes, and visual language unapologetically modern while placing them inside a ceremonial Shakespearean frame. The result is not “period Venice,” but a chamber of contracts, glamour, status, humiliation, wit, and danger.
This page therefore works by tension: contemporary stage photography held inside an old-world architecture of parchment, walnut, oxblood, and gilded restraint.
LawMercyDesireContractPerformanceJudgmentLawMercyDesireContractPerformanceJudgment
Act I
Proclamation
The stage opens in declaration. Speech is public, posture is theatrical, and status is immediately performed in front of others.
Act II
Masks, vanity, and social theatre
The production refuses one social register. Glamour, wit, excess, ceremony, and display become part of the Shakespearean engine.
Act III
Judgment and public pressure
At its centre, the production turns toward accusation, witness, argument, and the ritual of public decision.
Interlude
Archive, spectacle, and excess
Act IV
Stage memory
The page slows into architecture: curtain, projection, piano, chair, and the empty formal logic of the stage itself.
Cast and production team
The credits below are drawn from the production record and organized here in a cleaner dossier form.
Further cast
- Sol
- Pernille Louise Nordtorp (DK)
- Judge of Copenhagen
- Pernille Louise Nordtorp (DK)
- Prince of Morocco
- Justin Swayzy (DK/Ghana)
- Prince of Arragon
- Elisha Ngoma (DK/Congo)
- Gratiano / Old Gobbo
- Kevin K. Yuven (DK/Cameroon)
- Tubal
- Hind Charafi (DK/Marokko)
Production team
- Playwright
- William Shakespeare
- Artistic Director
- Michael Omoke (DK/Kenya)
- Director / Scenographer
- George Munyagi (Kenya)
- Composers
- Darlene Popek (DK/Canada) · Cecilie Rau Petersen (DK)
- Director’s Assistant
- Anne Maria Bilicher Skanborg (DK)
- Stage Manager
- Ann-Sofie Sobokogel (DK/Kenya)
- Production Manager
- Zach Khadudu (DK/Kenya)
- Costume Designer
- Anna Bramming (DK)
Additional credited roles include Prince of Morocco’s sidekick, dancer, Launcelot Gobbo, Lora, Sal, and other production contributors reflected in the archival credits extract.