Kate Plus Hate

The taming of the shrew
The stratford festival
the national post

Any show may be said to get off to a good start when it begins with an actor announcing that he is Tom Rooney, especially when he actually is Tom Rooney. This of course is before the play proper, in which his principal role is that of Tranio, the clever servant who spends most of the play disguised as his master while his master is pretending to be a schoolmaster, so as to have easier access to the maiden he loves. There are four characters in Shrew who dress up as people they aren't, and that's just the sub-plot. The main action, the Petruchio-Katharina story that everybody knows, is more concerned with psychological disguise. But then the whole play, as Chris Abraham's production is at pains to emphasise, exists within a frame whose theme is the fragility of identity. This early Shakespeare comedy comes equipped, uniquely, with an Induction in which Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, is persuaded that he is actually an amnesiac lord. It's for his entertainment that The Taming of the Shrew itself is presented, by a troupe of strolling players. The Stratford production rewrites this prologue somewhat, making it explicitly self referential; the players, no longer strolling, are the festival actors we know and love, enjoying themselves in, as a daring experiment, Elizabethan costume. (Rooney treats us to some appreciative words about pumpkin pants.) Further details must not be given away, but I can say that they are explosively funny and that some crucial ones were anticipated in the 1970s by a notable production at the English Stratford. I can note, as it's in the program, that Sly is played by Ben Carlson, displaying a previously unrevealed talent for rough-edged comedy and also, I suspect, for inspired improv. For the main part of the evening, he'll be Petruchio. It's also noteworthy that Deborah Hay, his future Kate, is the player who takes charge of the tinker's transmogrification. To cut to the chase: Hay is the angriest Katharina I have ever seen. Her rage burns fierce and lasts long, intimidating nearly everybody with whom she shares the stage and alarmingly audible even when she's off it. This of course is how the role is written, but few actresses are this uncompromising about it. Hay even passes up her few opportunities for pathos; complaining about how her father favours her younger sister or how her groom has kept her waiting at the church, she still doesn't give an inch. Nor, when she gets to the scene in which she's forced to take the sun for the moon and vice versa, does she play for comfortable laughs. By this point, most Kates are playing along with Petruchio's mind-games and rather enjoying them. Not this one; she just wants to get it over with.

Of course, Hay being the actress she is and Shakespeare the playwright he is, there are subtleties. Her first encounter with Petruchio isn't one of your obvious love-at-first-sight affairs; still, there are moments, breathtaking ones, at which the compliments he pays her, however oddly phrased, obviously get to her, as does the fact that he may be the first person ever to pay her serious attention. Her notorious speech of submission at the end is an extraordinary achievement, a cavalcade of contrasting colours, each transition instant and complete. Parts of it seem seriously and pleasurably meant, a relished revenge on the ladies who have persecuted her in the past; parts are ironic, a cartoon picture of subservience; and the climax is a challenge: extending her hand to Petruchio, she dares him to accept her as an equal. And he, dazed and impressed and delighted, accepts.

Because he too, in Carlson's performance, has been playing a part that he is glad to be rid of. He plays it, it must be said, to the limit, shouting at everybody (though not at her) nearly as loud as she does, teasing her with the promise of fine clothes, denying her food and sleep. And of course in doing so, denying them to himself as well. His director helps him out here with a subtle textual change: "she ate no meat today" becomes "we ate no meat today" and so on through the rest of Petruchio's shrew-taming manifesto, delivered quietly and in confidence to the audience, as if a mask were being lifted. The brutality of his methods are not played down; indeed, they're more evident than usual. What finally tames Katharina, or rather releases her, is Petruchio's giving her the opportunity to speak for herself. Maybe what we have here is love at last sight: our last sight, before we go home.

En route, Abraham delivers an uproarious production that sometimes bursts its bounds; I could do with fewer priests and musicians wandering across the stage, interrupting people's conversations. Some of the apparent excesses, though, turn out to be exactly what the text requires. The fact that we first see these actors playing themselves sets up an endearing sense of ensemble. Brian Tree, with his dry-biscuit delivery, makes both an individual and a social symbol out of Petruchio's servant Grumio, hard-bitten and hard-biting. Sarah Afful errs, probably under orders, by making Bianca an active sneak when in fact it's her unvarying docility, however hypocritical, that so infuriates her sister Kate. But she's flirtatiously fine in her scenes with her suitors, real and pretend, who are a fine bunch themselves. The usually nondescript Hortensio is given unprecedented foppish definition by Mike Shara; Michael Spencer-Davis' greybeard Gremio is a classic pantaloon, bent double and crabby; and Cyrus Lane gets some earnest fun out of the love-struck Lucentio, never quite sure of how much power he has ceded to his servant Tranio. Rooney's performance of this gentleman's gentleman is the expected virtuoso job, not least physically; so, in its way, is Gordon S. Miller's tongue-and-body-twisting turn as Biondello, the lackey's lackey, though it does get exhausting. As father Baptista, Peter Hutt gets considerable comic mileage out of everybody's straight man.

We never do return to Christopher Sly, neither in the received Shakespearean text nor in this production. The expectation, I think, is that we will keep his transformation in mind throughout all those that follow. It doesn't work out that way; we forget about him, at least at the time. But it's something to think about afterwards.