The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's Globe, London

Macbeth is supposed to be the unlucky play, but at Shakespeare's Globe this season it's Rebecca Gatward's production of The Merchant of Venice that has been prone to accident. First, the original Portia (Michelle Duncan) left for personal reasons during the previews and was replaced by her accomplished understudy, Kirsty Besterman. Then, on opening night, Mark Rice-Oxley succumbed to a gastric virus, and in the second half the role of Gratiano had to be taken over – and read from the text – by the likeably undaunted Craig Gazey, the actor playing Launcelot Gobbo.

The pluck of the company is not in question. What's more debatable is the pertinence of the production. Nine years ago, when Shakespeare's controversial comedy was first staged at the reconstituted Globe, some audiences hissed Shylock during the trial scene and laughed at his forced conversion. Did this suggest that our modern approach to the play – with Shylock as tragic hero and the Christians racist persecutors – was just enlightened revisionism? Had Shakespeare in fact written the piece especially for a theatre whose configuration and actor/audience dynamic encourage partisanship and broad comic effects?

Gatward occasionally seems to be testing the dangerousness of the venue in order to confront the audience with its own capacity to become a jeering mob. At one point the young Christian males push through the groundlings while performing a grossly anti-Semitic impersonation of Shylock's grief, as though willing the crowd to complicity.

If that's part of the aim, though, it is not executed with particular conviction or consistency. In general, this is an unsubtle, middle-of-the-road interpretation. The Venetian slickers, displaying touches of present-day bankers' pinstripe, are an unruly lot. Sporting a George Michael-style big-hair-and-beard look, Philip Cumbus's bumptious Bassanio is a blatant bisexual gold-digger who, after the promise of a loan, treats Dale Rapley's brooding Antonio to a long, calculating kiss. Besterman is a wittily self-possessed Portia but could afford to hint more at the psychological strain of being bound by her father's will. Likewise, Pippa Nixon needs to dig deeper into the conflicting emotions of the absconding Jessica – though John McEnery gives such an anaemic performance as a cadaverous Shylock that the character's memory fails to cast much guilt over the final act.

To 6 October (020-7401 9919)