How Kate Was Won
The Taming of the Shrew
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
The Stratford Festival's opening production of The Taming of the Shrew is set in the Wild West, or at least in its legendary movie equivalent. Two obvious questions: Is this illuminating? Is it fun? The answer is that it isn't always either, but that it's enough of both to be worth anybody's while. Most importantly, Miles Potter's production sets off two lead performances that are in perfect command of the stage, the text and the audience's pleasure. Graham Abbey's Petruchio and Seana McKenna's Katharina exemplify what Stratford is, or should be, about.
Abbey's Petruchio is a Clint Eastwood hero, laconic and dangerous, with Morricone music heralding his entrance. (If you're going to turn a comedy set in Renaissance Italy into a western, there's obvious sense in making it a spaghetti western.) Presenting Petruchio as the strong, silent type sets up an interesting tension, since he's the most talkative character in the play. This is a Petruchio who can quell a frontier saloon with a glance, a gun and a twirling rope, plus a few card tricks and the odd reference to his deceased father. One of the production's nicer touches is the suggestion that the late Antonio was the terror of the county, and that Petruchio now has the use of his reputation. He also uses what you might call rhetoric, though even when he's at his most boastful, it's on the level.
"Level" is the word for Abbey's delivery throughout. He rarely raises his voice, trusting to the fact that Shakespeare, presumably on purpose, has given him lines more colourful and sensible than are available to any other man in the cast. Abbey is adept at finding humour in his lines, rather than laying it on and gouging it out. He's nervous before meeting Kate (he checks his gun) and then, like most Petruchios, falls in love with her at first sight. But, having once paid his lyrical tribute to "the prettiest Kate in Christendom," he doesn't dwell on it. He is very businesslike, and the whole taming process is an uphill struggle, not a step to be taken for granted.
I wonder why no production I have seen has marked the turning point in Kate's career: the moment at which, when Petruchio belabours a servant, she interposes with "patience, I pray you, 'twas a fault unwilling." It must be the first time in her life that she has said a word on behalf of another person. Nothing else, though, is missed in McKenna's performance. She terrorizes would- be suitors with a rifle, and beats her younger sister Bianca up real hard. She is also age-conscious, and not just in respect to Bianca. She never gets over Petruchio's reference to her as his elder, though I wouldn't say she makes a meal of it. Obviously she meets her match, in all senses, in Petruchio. Everyone else in town, male or female, is an idiot.
The conventional romantic interpretation of the play is at work here, but it's tested more rigorously than usual. This Kate never stops fighting. She isn't happily playing Petruchio's game by the time they get to their sun-and- moon controversy. He has to work for her acquiescence, and he looks a bit silly when he gets it.
Her famous, or notorious, submission speech is delivered, with house-stilling virtuosity, to three separate recipients. Much of it is aimed, formidably, at the Widow, who turns up in the last scene as Hortensio's bride -- a role I have never seen given such importance, or perhaps just never seen so well acted (by Lally Cadeau) as it is here. The gain to the play is enormous. Kate obviously loathes her on sight, as a complacent harridan. Some of the speech she directs at herself, as she tries to work out what her married role will be -- how much she owes and how much she is owed. The third audience is Petruchio, who is served gracious notice on what he can expect. She's on her knees at the end of the speech; when he demands a kiss, he has to join her there to get it. I wouldn't say this solves all the play's problems, but it gives them a healthy airing. When the couple go off to bed at the end, one is not only happy for them but relieved.
The badlands setting lends unusual plausibility to Katharina's words about husbands putting their lives on the line for their wives' protection, and it lends credibility to other bits as well -- to Lucentio's claim, for instance, that he killed a man the moment he hit town. But if you want to prove that Shakespeare's text fits perfectly into this new landscape, you should play the game according to the rules. They're broken when you start mucking around with the place names, or for that matter changing "argosies" to "shipments" and "galliases" to "goldmines." On a related point, we all agree that standards of Stratford verse-speaking have shot up, so couldn't they learn how to stress quite simple words like "satiety" and "choleric"?
The supporting actors seem to be on a loose rein, though probably no looser than in a conventional production. There's a lot of anxious subdivision of lines for laughs that don't come, especially in the courtship scenes with Bianca, plus the regulation number of phallic gags. (Save it for Aristophanes, later in the season. He holds the patent.) But most of them some of the time -- and some of them most of the time -- manage to zero in on their characters and their material.
Wayne Best successfully reinvents Grumio as a bowlegged cowpoke's sidekick, as gabby as Hayes, and Donald Carrier as the amorphous Hortensio manages to impose himself in three separate identities: as earnest citizen, witless wooer and occasional moral compass. Jonathan Goad's Mexican Tranio is wildly excessive as a servant, but witty when impersonating his master. Paul Soles' Baptista looks and sounds exactly right as a white-coated senator in the making, and Kyle Blair gets some bashful humour out of Lucentio.
I liked Les Carlson's bemused Vincentio, who apparently came from England and kept his accent, and developed a soft spot for Barry MacGregor's Pedant (now known as the Man from Mantua), who has two accents, one real and one fake, and gets confused between them. Deborah Hay's Bianca seems too dumb and mean to attract even this gang of admirers, but she makes some sense in the last scene, which she plays drunk. Indeed, everything comes satisfyingly together at the denoument, and when a production of a Shakespeare comedy has achieved that, it's achieved virtually everything.