The Rumpscuttle
The Taming of The Shrew
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer
Shakespeare keeps as many plots going as Middleton and Deker, but he is far clearer about them. Barry Kyle puts this to the test by adopting at least three separate styles of direction. The Induction is a bit Merrie England, with extensive roistering, fully-equipped huntsmen led by a polished elderly Lord (Raymond Bowers) and strolling players singing carols.
Christopher Sly’s somnambulistic state is carefully stressed (this is the RSC and they know that dreams equal themes) and from time to time he wanders into the play proper, with oddly haunting effect. For the production has now gone way beyond him. The Players prove to be prophetic souls, whose Elizabethanism does not prevent them dressing young lover Lucentio in Edwardian boater and blazer. They are also learned, and make Gremio the pantaloon into a figure of Roman comedy.
It would not be true to say that anything goes; Mr. Kyle has the last scene in view, in which the professed romantics prove uxorious fools, and here his conceptions of Hortensio as clod and Lucentio as outright ninny come in very useful. That may console you as you watch these characters being built effortfully up. The accredited low comics are actually played straight, by Pete Postlethwaite and David Shaw-Parker, and they are far funnier for it.
Most productions play Petruchio and Katherina as in love anyway; only Michael Bogdanov has treated the taming as outright sadism. I think myself that from the moment when Petruchio, at their first meeting, calls his lady ‘the prettiest Kate in Christendom’ the romantics have an open-and-shut case; ‘Kate’ seems to have been the most affectionate word in Shakespeare’s vocabulary.
Mr. Kyle tries to have it both ways. Alun Armstrong’s Petruchio is, in intention, both lout and lover, making the benevolent break when, having denied her new clothes, he lectures Katherina affectionately on the virtues of ‘honest, plain habiliments.’ This is to place a lot of weight on one speech, and Mr. Armstrong has not yet the vocal command to bring it off.
Sinead Cusack, though, has it to spare; and, after having slapped stick with tremendous intrepidity (falling successively into a pool of water and the front row of the stalls), she delivers her recantation with a transfixing suppleness and wit. Elsewhere in RSC things have sunk so far that the actors cannot even fit syllables to metre. (Gallant and choleric are specific abominations.)
The playwright wins through. I share Mr. Kyle’s enthusiasm for the Jacobeans (with whom he has an excellent record), but, frankly, the worst of Shakespeare (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, right?) stands a better chance on stage than the best of his contemporaries: not through genius, but through competence.