How do you stage Shakespeare’s most problematic play in the cancel culture era? One solution, as proffered by the Globe, is to place trigger warnings – “This production contains racism, including antisemitism and anti-black racism” – on the show’s web page, give the cast antisemitism training, and invite Jewish director Abigail Graham to “reclaim” the play.

The result is conceptually interesting but dramatically deadening. Graham’s modern-dress production opens with Antonio, Bassanio and their gang wearing expensive linen suits and partying to The Black Eyed Peas’ obnoxious I Gotta Feeling. In a scene moved up from Act II, Launcelot announces his defection from his master Shylock, but has to play by the rules of their boorish city-boy culture to gain entry, like downing a shot every time he says “Jew”.

It establishes these bullying bros as the arch villains before we learn any of their more humanising characteristics, like Bassanio’s hopes to woo Portia and Antonio’s eagerness to help him. In contrast, Shylock (played by Jewish actor Adrian Schiller) is introduced as an unassuming figure in a subtle Kippah and dowdy mac, carrying an eco-friendly travel mug. He looks like a put-upon geography teacher.

Schiller’s mild-mannered Shylock is a persecuted martyr from the off, with the formidable Antonio racially insulting and physically intimidating him. Graham adds a line to the text clarifying that, by law, Shylock’s only option is to work as a moneylender, helping us to understand the seriousness of Antonio constantly undercutting him by lending out funds gratis. This isn’t about greed: it’s survival. Claiming his pound of flesh is a desperate strike at his exterminator.

Unfortunately, in taking such pains to humanise Shylock, Graham renders everyone else monstrous. Though Michael Gould supplies a compelling Antonio, he’s a one-note, white-supremacist thug, while Michael Marcus’s Bassanio is a conceited chancer who fails upwards. They seem bound more by privilege than by affection. Ben Caplan’s Solanio does a nasty antisemitic impression, and the whole group torments Shylock by dry-humping masks featuring his missing daughter Jessica, over whose loss Shylock weeps piteously while a klezmer-esque clarinet wails.