The leafy delights of an Athenian wood with its fairy denizens were swapped for the dank and depressing atmosphere of a jail as Propeller followed its production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a second Shakespeare play performed last week at the Playhouse in very different style.

The uncomfortable fusion of malice, bigotry and violence that is The Merchant of Venice was no doubt in the mind of director Edward Hall when he decided to stage the play as if performed by the inmates of a prison. Life ‘inside’, alas, reflects these horrors – just as it sometimes provides a setting, too, for acts of kindness and mercy such as the action also illustrates. Jails, moreover, are segregated on sexual grounds, as is the all-male Propeller company.

As played by the excellent Bob Barrett, Angelo, the titular merchant, is an all-powerful Mr Big among the prisoners. Like Harry Grout of TV’s Porridge, he gets what he wants – including, quite clearly, the sexual favours of Bassanio (Jack Tarlton). So, we have the familiar ‘gay reading’ of the play, which in this setting works even better than usual.

A particularly felicitous touch, I thought, is the way Antonio – clearly jealous of his boy’s love for Portia (Kelsey Brookfield) – encourages him to give away the ring he had been ordered by her never to part with. This lends a welcome extra dimension to an episode that often seems no more than a tedious appendage to the play’s main action.

This, of course, concerns the attempt by Shylock (Richard Clothier) to secure his pound of Antonio’s flesh. Having witnessed him helping himself to the eye of another ‘prisoner’ in a grisly torture scene, we must consider him fully capable of such an outrage.

But the baddies here have no monopoly on torture, as can be judged (above) from the painful attack by Nerissa (Chris Myles) on boyfriend Gratiano (Richard Frame).