Peter Viney's Blog

The Taming of The Shrew
By William Shakespeare

Directed by Justin Audibert
Set Design by Stephen Brimson Lewis
Music by Ruth Chan

Royal Shakespeare Company,
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Thursday 11th April 2019, matinee

Joseph Arkley- Katharine, Baptista’s older son
Charlotte Arrowsmith – Curtis, Petruchia’s serval the
Hannah Azuonye- Pedant
Melody Brown – Vincentia, Lucentio’s mother, a merchant
Richard Clews- Grumio
James Cooney- Bianco, Baptista’s younger son
Amelia Donkor – Hortensia, friend to Petruchia and suitor to Bianco
Laura Elsworthy – Trania, servant to Lucentio
Amanda Harris – Baptista Minola
Emily Johnstone – Lucentia, in love with Bianco
Alex Jones – Haberdasher
Alexander Mushore- Servant
Michael Patrick – Tailor
Claire Price – Petruchia, a suitor to Katherine
Sophie Stanton – Gremia, a suitor to Bianco
Aaron Thiara – Servant of Petruchia
Amy Triff – Biondella, servant to Lucentio
Leo Wan – Widower

Some do, some don’t, but I’ve always liked The Taming of The Shrew. I’ve seen it many times, but surprisingly this is only the third time since I started reviews on this blog. Modern audiences find the second part unpleasant and unfunny as a rule.

The Taming of The Shrew  in this production is not gender-blind but consciously gender switched. I had my doubts before going in, but they were totally dispelled. As the programme tells us: 1591. England is a matriarchy. So they establish an alternate universe. The names are switched (mainly) as Italian makes it easy to change a masculine -o ending to a feminine -a ending. Vincentio becomes Vincentia, Baptisto becomes Baptista, in the course of switching to female, while the younger daughter, Bianca, becomes the younger son, Bianco.  They got stuck with the name Katherine for the older son, simply because Kate and Katherine appear so often in the text and there is no male equivalent. You just learn to live with it applied to a man.

The women are still dressed elaborately as women, with tight controlled elaborate hair styles. The men are dressed as men, and have long flowing cavalier locks, except for the crop-haired Katherine – so as in the normal gender version, he’s the equivalent of a tom-boy. He also has crude male manners with food, slobbering down chicken with his fingers. It’s a male thing. I can eat a sandwich without a plate, knife, fork and napkin. My companion prefers not to.

We get 16th century costume! This is so rare nowadays that it was a delight to see. The costume was richly embroidered and colourful throughout too. They used colour coding which is subliminal but works. So Lucentia and Trania her servant are in reds. So is (the real) Vincentia, Lucentia’s mother. By the end, Petruchia and Katherine are in greens. Hortensia and the widower are in blacks and silver. Gremia is in purple. It always works.

The set looks surprisingly like the Wanamaker Playhouse at The Globe, though that’s always fixed. Here panels could be reversed to move from Baptista’s mansion to Petruchia’s plainer house, or opened altogether to create more sense of space. Very good. The platform across the middle is shared with As You Like It this season, but it worked rather better in this play.

They have dropped the induction, which sets the story as a play within a play, so is often the “excuse” for the storyline.

Shakespeare understood back in 1591 or 1592 the basis of the modern ‘concentration camp theory’ which was applied to studies of American and Caribbean slavery systems. There comes a point where starvation, cruelty and sleep deprivation renders captives completely passive. That’s why there were so few slave revolts in spite of the advantage of number. A small number of oppressors could hold sway. He used it in Taming of The Shrew where Petruchio tames Katherine by starvation and sleep deprivation with no hope of escape. As we said coming out, the second half taming sequence normally leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. The gender switch made it seem further over the top and so ludicrous rather than deeply offensive.

Baptista (Amanda Harris) and her two sons Bianco, left (James Cooney) and Katherine, right (Joseph Arkley)

In case you’ve avoided the plot, this is it with the gender shifts in place. Baptista (Amanda Harris) is a rich woman in Padua, and has two sons and she wants to marry them off. The younger, Bianco (James Cooney), is much sought after by female suitors, but Baptista insists that he cannot marry before his older brother, Katherine is off her hands. (Phew I begin to see the adaptation problem they had in sorting out  he, him, his and she, her, hers!).

Katherine (Joseph Arkley) bullies Bianco (James Cooney). Note threat is with scissors, as befits a domestic situation, not a dagger.

The trouble is, Katherine (Joseph Arkley) is a shrew and a scold (they couldn’t find equivalent male words, so the programme says). He is also aggressive, tying and beating up the gentle Bianco.

Lucentia (Emily Johnstone) and Trania (Laura Elsworthy) listening in

The play opens here with Lucentia (Emily Johnstone) and her servant Trania (Laura Elsworthy) arriving in town from Pisa. They overhear Bianco’s two suitors, the older  Gremia (Sophie Stanley) and the younger, Hortensia (Amelia Donkor). They also see Bianco, and Lucentia falls in love with him.

The cunning plan is for Trania to pretend to be Lucentia, while Lucentia poses as a schoolmistress, and persuades Gremia to promote her to Baptista as a tutor for Bianco.  As a schoolmistress, she will call herself Cambia. Trania does swashbuckling cape twirls as she pretends to be Lucentia, and the musicians hit her twirl perfectly every time. Meanwhile, Hortensia disguises herself (with an eye patch) as a lute tutor, so as to get to Bianco.

Hortensia (Ameia Donkor) teaches Bianco (James Cooney) fingering (on the lute)

However they need to get Katherine married first, and fortunately Hortensia’s old friend Petruchia turns up with her servant, Grumio. Claire Price, as Petruchia, is taking the role Richard Burton once played on film. Petruchia is an old soldier, and has an unruly hairstyle in contrast to the neat wigs of the gentlewomen of Padua. They offer her money to court and marry Katherine.

Petruchia (Claire Price) woos Katherine (Joseph Arkley)

Stranded at the altar. L to R: Gremia, Trania (pretending to be Lucentia), Hortensia (disguised as music tutor), Katherine in the centre, then Lucentia (disguised as Cambia the teacher), Bianco, Baptista.

She (Petruchia) agrees, but turns up late and scruffy for the wedding, declines to attend the feast and leads him (Katherine) off to her (Petruchia) rougher abode in the country. It is so difficult remembering the pronouns for this version when you know the play – though when you see it, all is clear. The wedding scene has a rousing choir standing on the balcony.

After the wedding: Petruchia leads Katherine away. Grumio and Biondella to the left.

The second part focusses on the taming. The country house has a cast of six servants and is battered and worn (as are the servants).

Petruchia’s servants

The Bianco sub plot is complicated when Trania (pretending to be Lucentia) and Gremia have a bidding war for Bianco’s hand. Trania needs proof of the vast sums she has promised. She meets a pedant from Mantua bound for Padua, and persuades her that she will be killed because the Duchesses of Mantua and Padua are at war again (a device Shakespeare was fond of and represents the Elizabethan view of Italy). The pedant has to pretend to be Vincentia, Lucentia’s mother from Pisa. Of course, then the real Vicentia turns up.

Gremia the older suitor (Sophie Stanley)

Sophie Stanley is so good as Gremia. She glides along in her long dress as if on wheels – a trick Mark Rylance used as Olivia in The Globe Twelfth Night in 2012. She struggles with her sword several times though she can’t manage to draw it. When she finally does, near the end, we all burst into spontaneous applause. She got another burst of mid-scene applause on an exit. It will certainly be one of the best comedy performances of 2019. They’re all good though, it’s line up of comedy cameos of the highest order, and it’s a massed full-skirted brilliant female comic ensemble.

Biondella, Lucentia’s second servant (Amy Tiff)

The RSC announced they would be having an actor in a wheelchair this season, and they do. Amy Triff plays Biondella, the second servant to Lucentia. It doesn’t feel forced on the audience at all, because she is great on her lines, and whizzes around at such extraordinary speed in the wheelchair that it makes a positive feature of it.

The one thing that jarred for both of us was the scene that opened the second half between Grumio (Richard Clews) and the deaf servant, Curtis (Charlotte Arrowsmith). They had a scene together in As You Like It this season too, which indicates that Richard Clews is the one that knows how to use British Sign Language. They were both funny here again, but it’s a scene that can easily be cut heavily (and has been), or even abandoned altogether. Because of the signing meaning translating, it extended the scene greatly in time, losing dynamics, thus making it a dead slow start to the second part after such a vibrant first half. If you want to use deaf actors, fine, but just don’t do it in long two-way dialogue scenes. It’s the old rule of film editing, whenever you find the thought “This is too good to cut …” entering your head, cut it.

In the end … L to R: Trania, Vincentia, Petruchia, Katherine, Gremia

The programme says 2 hours 20 minutes plus interval. It started at 1.15. We came out at around ten past four, meaning it stretched fifteen minutes over the time. To be fair, apart from that one scene, neither of us felt “this is long.”

I’m hovering on five star, but I thought the RSC Cinema Paradiso version with Lisa Dillon as Katherine in 2012 was even better so I want to differentiate!

Four star plus (**** +)

PROGRAMME

The programme has an essay bemoaning the fact that from 2016 to 2018 ‘only 13% of male leading parts were played by women.’ As they’re MALE leading parts, 13% seems a lot to me. Excessive. No one suggests women should play ‘male leading parts’ on TV or film. Obviously modern settings will have 50% women at least anyway, but historical stuff often doesn’t. Fine, 50/50 gender over a whole theatre season is sensible, but not in every play and please stop enforcing it on Shakespeare. Do other plays. Write some. Or as here (successfully) rename and reverse it. But not “blind.” Don’t follow The Globe up blindly-PC alleys!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

4 star
Fiona Mountford, Standard ****
Natasha Tripney, The Stage ****

Audibert’s production is one of clarity – all the various plot strands, the marital and financial wrangling are made clear. He also milks as much comedy as he can out of the earlier scenes, though perhaps to the detriment of the play’s darker, nastier moments. Sophie Stanton’s Gremia can raise a laugh with a single well-timed sigh. Laura Elsworthy as Trania brings wit and clarity to the often convoluted Lucentia subplot. Price combines the dash and swagger of Lord Flashheart with the impish energy of Carol Kane.

Michael Davies, What’s On Stage ****

3 star
Michael Billington, Guardian ***

Some will object that this version goes too far: my main complaint is that it doesn’t go far enough. Even if you regender all the pronouns and imagine a Renaissance world where women hold sway, you can’t get away from the big issue: that the action hinges on physical and psychological dominance. Claire Price admittedly makes Petruchia a likable swaggerer with a strange fondness for her recalcitrant partner. She still, however, announces that her husband is “my goods, my chattels … my any thing”, still subjects him to sensory and sleep-deprivation and, crucially, still declares that a lasting marriage is based on “awful rule and right supremacy”. While it is mildly subversive to hear those words spoken by a woman, it is a reminder that this is ultimately a play about power.

Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph ***

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
The Taming of The Shrew – RSC 2012
The Taming of The Shrew – Globe 2016

This is playing in repertory with As You like It, and Measure for Measure, with many of the cast appearing in two of the plays.

JUSTIN AUDIBERT (Director)
Snow in Midsummer, RSC 2017
The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe, RSC 2015
Flare Path by Terence Rattigan, Salisbury Playhouse 2015

JOSEPH ARKLEY
The Rehearsal, Chichester 2015 (Villebosse)
Richard III, Almeida 2016 (Rivers)
The Witch of Edmonton, RSC 2014
The White Devil, RSC 2014
Measure for Measure, RSC 2019

CLAIRE PRICE
The Way of The World, Chichester 2012
Measure for Measure, RSC 2019

SOPHIE STANTON
The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich, RSC 2018
As You Like It, RSC 2019

AMANDA HARRIS
Troilus & Cressida, RSC 2018
Measure for Measure, RSC 2019

EMILY JOHNSTONE
As You Like It, RSC 2019

LAURA ELSWORTHY
Miss Littlewood, RSC 2018
The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich RSC 2018
The Hypocrite, RSC 2017
As You Like It, RSC 2019

JAMES COONEY
Troilus & Cressida, RSC 2018
King Lear, RSC 2016
Cymbeline, RSC 2016
Hamlet, RSC 2016
Measure for Measure, RSC 2019

AMELIA DONKOR
As You Like It, RSC 2019

LEO WAN
As You Like It, RSC 2019

RICHARD CLEWS
As You Like It, RSC 2019
King Lear, Chichester 2017

CHARLOTTE ARROWSMITH
As You Like It, RSC 2019