A Carnival of Sexes

The Taming of the Shrew
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Peter Hinton has enough imagination, invention, intelligence and cheek for four directors. This is a good thing. But his Stratford production of The Taming of the Shrew might actually be the work of four directors. It's never dull and bits of it are inspired, but it is confusing.

Its jumping-off point seems to be a historical paradox. The Shrew, a play that has been taken to advocate the subjugation of women, was written at a time in England when a woman was in charge. This production brings Elizabeth I onstage, both as a backdrop, courtesy of a hugely blown-up miniature, and in her own person. First, in what directors insist on referring to as "the rarely staged Induction," though I can hardly recall a production that didn't include it, she takes the place of the text's anonymous Lord; that is, she finds the tinker Christopher Sly passed out in front of an inn, and persuades him that he is a nobleman, for whom the play-within-the-play -- The Taming of the Shrew itself -- is performed. And when that play gets underway, the Queen, or someone looking exactly like her, starts appearing in it; she takes the role of the Widow who pairs up with the spurned wooer Hortensio in the last scene and seems about to give him a tough marital time. This is very hard to follow. It's also, in a production whose costumes and general ambience are aggressively Elizabethan, unconvincing. No acting troupe of the time, strolling or otherwise, would have put the Virgin Queen recognizably onstage (as a twice-married woman, yet) unless it fancied being hung, drawn and quartered. And though England is famously littered with pubs claiming that Queen Elizabeth slept there, she would not have been caught on any premises patronized by the likes of Sly. Ins Choi makes less of the tinker's ordinarily juicy role that any actor I have seen, possibly because there's so much going on around him. The Queen herself (Barbara Fulton) is woefully uncommunicative as an actress, but seems to have been cast for her singing. Oh yes, she sings as well. So does most of the cast, especially the tavern wenches, who give out with ballads of the time (plus one that's been smuggled in from The Beggar's Opera) about the woes of wedlock: 15th-century hurtin' songs.

So, is Petruchio's "taming" of Katherina a hurtin' thing or a healin' thing? It depends here on which scene you're looking at.

Kate has a limp; that's a very literal reading of a line of Petruchio's that's probably meant as a joke, but it gives her a source of resentment to add to the usual ones of an unsympathetic father and spoiled younger sister.

Irene Poole's is a very intense performance whose anger, as hasn't always been the case in her modern work, is kept within the bounds of the character. She also has a dormant wit that's sparked, to her visible surprise, by Evan Buliung's eloquent and unusually sensitive Petruchio. They fall in love at first meeting. This always happens in productions of the Shrew, for the very good reason that it's what happens in the play, but it's unusual for her to kiss him on demand as willingly as she does at the end of the wooing scene here. It does make the rest of the play seem sort of unnecessary, and more than usually cruel. But there are complications here too, as Buliung makes clear, with the help of the odd pronoun-change, that in depriving her of food and sleep, he's doing it to himself as well. She gives in, but, unlike most Kates, she doesn't happily play along. It's hard to know what to make of her submission speech, but she isn't playing it for irony. It provokes an alarmed squeak of protest from Adrienne Gould's Bianca, though since this kid sibling has hitherto been the usual tease and more than the usual flirt, it's a bit late in the night for her to start playing the sisterhood card. Anyway Petruchio seems genuinely touched, and the pair are all set for what critics from Harold Bloom to Germaine Greer have hailed as one of the few happy marriages in Shakespeare.

What Hinton seems to be at is providing a carnival of the period's shifting attitudes to relations between the sexes. But you have to pant to keep up. I've always believed that Katherina's turning point comes when she intercedes on behalf of a servant whom Petruchio is berating; it's the first time she's considered anybody's feelings besides her own. Add Hinton's to the long line of productions that have failed to mark this moment: surprisingly, since elsewhere masters and servants are much on his mind. The two themes collide when he turns the lackey Grumio into a woman, one whom Petruchio can beat as he would never dream of beating his wife. (Kate hits him, not the reverse.) The only thing that can be said for this muddying of the play's sexual politics is that it provides a good if unexpected role for Lucy Peacock. Intriguingly, she passes the oppression down to her subordinate Curtis (Paul Dunn), a stay-at-home drudge who begs for news of the outside world as if literally starved for it.

Over in the Bianca subplot, the help are having an even rougher time: A passing threat to slit the nose of the uppity valet Tranio is taken, like Kate's limp, literally, so that Ben Carlson turns up in the last scene nasally mutilated but still serving. I have no idea what Patrick McManus is doing with the page Biondello, for whom he looks both too old and too upscale. Still, what with Randy Hughson, Jeff Lillico and Juan Chioran as rival suitors (Tom, Dick and Harry in the Cole Porter translation) the stage is alive with good actors clinging fiercely to their author, their director and their own instincts. Best of the lot is Stephen Ouimette as father Baptista, giving a squirm of incredulous delight at getting his problem daughter off his hands. Santo Loquasto's set is a handsome complement to the spare modern lines of his Hamlet. As for what Elizabeth is doing in the middle of it all: I believe that Hinton thinks that the Queen has deposed the tinker and the play is her dream -- of what her life might have been, for better and for worse, as an ordinary woman. It's ingenious, but as usual in such cases, the play, knowing nothing of such things, buckles under the strain.