13/08/2026
*GAYINA'S POUND OF FLESH: A GHANAIAN COURT SUMMONS SHYLOCK*
_A Review_
*Production details:* Gayina, Pound of Flesh, adapted and directed by Quaye from William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The production is a collaboration between Communication, Image Bureau, and the National Theatre of Ghana, with performers from the National Theatre Players, the National Dance Company, and guest artistes including Godwin Nambo, Ghartey, Gadede Segbefia, Roland Adom, Elvis Crystal, Grace Afanyi Owusu Arhin, Lucille Naakwaley King and Boakye “Buche”. The National Theatre of Ghana, Accra, is the venue, and this review reflects the first of four scheduled performances, 4:00 p.m., 8 August 2026.
*An Old Bond, Reissued in Cedis*
Ghanaian theatre has long treated the Shakespearean canon less as sacred text than as raw material a set of dramaturgical bones onto which local flesh can be grafted. George Quaye's _Gayina's Pound of Flesh_ belongs squarely in that tradition. The play borrows the architecture of _The Merchant of Venice_, the pound of flesh, the friend who stands surety, the casket-like test for a suitor's hand, the courtroom reversal and resets it in a contemporary Ghana of 2026, moving fluidly between Kumasi, where the play's two adversaries keep their homes and offices, and Cape Coast, where its Portia figure, Araba, tends her garden. The transposition is bold in its ambition and, for the most part, persuasive in its ex*****on: this is not a costume exercise draped over Shakespeare's plot but a genuine act of cultural translation, one that understands usury, debt, and vengeance as categories that travel well across centuries and coastlines.
Shylock becomes Gayina; feared, wealthy, and, crucially, a man of traditional religious conviction. Antonio becomes Oppong Kyekyeku, a Christian businessman whose public mockery of Gayina's traditional practice supplies the adaptation's most significant departure from its source: where Shakespeare's bond is racialised and religiously coded along Christian-Jewish lines already fraught with the antisemitism of his age, Quaye relocates the wound to the more immediately legible terrain of Ghana's own religious plurality, the friction between Christianity and traditional belief that still animates households, courtrooms, and pulpits across the country. It is a shrewd substitution. Gayina's fury is not written as villainy for its own sake but as the accumulated injury of a man repeatedly disgraced for what he holds sacred, and the production is careful, through Afrifa's counsel and Gayina's own daughter's opposition to her father's pursuit of vengeance, to let the audience feel the cost of bitterness without excusing the cruelty it produces.
*Directing*
George Quaye's direction is at its most confident when it is least reverent toward the proscenium. The fourth wall is broken early and often: market women and men enter through the aisles, a pragia (mini-car) and an okada (motorbike) find their way onto the main stage, and a Pastor opens proceedings with the loose, call-and-response cadence of contemporary Ghanaian pulpit rhetoric, drawing the audience into complicity before the plot has properly begun. More geared towards naturalism,these choices do real dramaturgical work: they establish the play's marketplace and lorry-station geography more convincingly than a painted backdrop could, and they announce, structurally, that this will be a communal telling rather than a hermetic one.
The staging of the courtship trial; Araba's suitors invited to choose from objects revealed in the orchestra pit, is an elegant local answer to Shakespeare's caskets, and the arrival of the northern mogul Alhaji Ibrahim Suleiman Amin, heralded in with the Damba dance, is one of the evening's genuine set-pieces: a piece of stagecraft that also functions as cultural pedagogy, folding in commentary on the significance of tribal marks in northern Ghanaian society without breaking the scene's momentum. The call-and-response by the griots is not decorative; it does the narrative labour that a chorus would in the Shakespearean original. Equally well handled is the Ga traditional marriage sequence, led by a female Okyeame; a directorial decision that quietly corrects, rather than merely observes, gendered convention, and whose sung appellation for Dr Daniel Boye supplies one of the production's most rich moments.
Scene transitions, occurring live and in full view of the audience, were on the whole seamless, no small feat given the scale of the design. Where a genuinely elaborate change was unavoidable, Quaye's choice to fill the interval with adverts rather than dead air is a pragmatic, audience-literate solution that deserves more credit than such devices usually receive. It is worth noting that the director's handling of pace and tempo worked to the production's advantage, keeping the audience's interest alive for over two hours. The production strove for an artistic reality, most visible in the fully dressed and elegant garden set for Araba's home.
*Lighting*
As lighting plays a huge role for the success of a production, it would have been super if lighting had executed well and complimented the various scenes with excellent transitions and focusing. The office scene as Kyekyeku's leaned on a follow spot that was not held steady, which hampered visibility for the audience; think a fixed spot or a Fresnel would have served the actors better, giving them a defined area to work within for a scene of that length. More consequential was a recurring imbalance between foreground and background levels: the background lights were often brighter than the foreground, making visibility a challenge. This was evident in Gayina's home, where faces, particularly those under caps or headwear were difficult to make out at points that mattered most for the emotional stakes of the scene. This is a fixable problem, and not one that should overshadow a production whose other scenes were confidently blocked with light rather than merely lit. The lighting in Araba's home garden deserves commendation, the use of specials to illuminate the foliage, and those revealing the objects to be selected by the suitors. Only that the romantic scene between Afrifa and Araba could have been enhanced with some blue lights to create a desired mood. Again, the courtroom, too, was well lit, with the cast clearly visible throughout.
*The Linguistic Approach*
The ensemble carried the production's linguistic ambition well. The dialogue moves between English and Twi, laced with Akan proverbs. Songs were sung in languages including Dagbani, Akan, and Ga; Gayina speaks English with an Ewe tonal inflection, applied consistently throughout. Nelson and Emefa's love duet was sung in Akan (tina menkyen) and Ewe (lolo nava), reflecting their respective heritage. The production is equally alert to the political comedy embedded in linguistic pride: Gayina's own misgivings about how Akans insist that others learn their language, set against their own reluctance to speak anyone else's, land as a gentle but unmistakable satire. The vulgarity characteristic of Ga comic idiom was engaged here too, extended into pointed jabs at political leadership to the audience's evident delight.
Two moments stood out on this viewing. Afrifa's monologue in Araba's garden was the afternoon's clearest demonstration of stage control, clean in its movements, unhurried in its delivery, and genuinely revealing of a character whose quest for a bride was believable, noble, and well-intentioned. And Araba's delivery in court, she is reconceived here as a lawyer who has never practised but takes up the case for love, carries the production's best line and its clear-eyed thesis in one breath: Love can wait, death does not, spoken with an unfussy conviction that sustained the courtroom scenes that followed. The play's small reversal of gendered courtship convention, in which Araba gives Afrifa the ring rather than receiving one, is consistent with this characterisation and lands as earned rather than merely clever.
*Judgment; The Ghanaian Style*
The production's resolution is where its cultural translation is most complete and most satisfying. In place of Shakespeare's Venetian tribunal, Quaye stages the reckoning beneath Ghana's own Coat of Arms, the customary emblem of judicial authority in the country's courts, and the substitution does more than furnish local colour, it grounds the play's climactic mercy in an institution the audience recognises as their own. Gayina's bond, like Shylock's, is one pound of flesh; the production wisely does not sand down the brutality of that demand, and the courtroom's turn away from strict entitlement toward mercy is framed explicitly as a reconciliation of Christian and traditional belief rather than a victory of one over the other. Kyekyeku's closing line the law saved his life but mercy saved them all is the production's clearest statement of theme, earned by everything the two-plus hours before it have built.
*Verdict*
_Gayina's Pound of Flesh_ is a confident, culturally fluent adaptation that understands what makes _The Merchant of Venice_ durable, its interrogation of debt, dignity, and the difference between justice and mercy, and finds a Ghanaian frame sturdy enough to carry that weight without strain. Quaye's direction is at its strongest in the production's communal, market-born stagecraft and in its handling of the courtroom's moral reversal; the let down, on this performance at least, by lighting choices that occasionally obscured the very faces the drama needed the audience to read. That said, the larger achievement stands: an adaptation that treats its source with enough respect to earn its audience's appreciation. The play is worth the watch, and worth watching again as the run settles into its later performances.
_By Solomon Y. Dartey (PhD) & Raphael Junior Mensah (MPhil)_
