Shrew
Canadian Stage: Shakespeare in High Park
The National Post

This year's High Park show is Shrew, based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, but not to be confused with it. It is quite confusing enough on its own account.

Shakespeare's piece is a play within a play; the main action, comprising the Petruchio-Katharina shenanigans with assorted subplots, is presented before the drunken tinker Christopher Sly, who has been tricked by a passing aristocrat into believing that he is himself a nobleman enjoying a command performance by some strolling players.

Sarah Stanley's production retains this framework; some of the pre-opening puffs have even suggested that she's rescued it from long obscurity. Actually, I can't remember a production of The Taming of the Shrew that didn't include the Induction in some form, though in recent years it's been treated with increasing freedom; i.e., it's been subjected to wholesale cuts and rewrites.

The present version is conservative by comparison. In the original, Sly gets thrown out of a pub for non- payment; he and the Hostess trade insults, and then she trots off to call the law. That happens here, too, except that the pair now come to blows before she goes. He then passes out as usual, and everything else unfolds according to text. Except that when the play proper begins, Sly, who for obvious reasons has gender-relations on his mind, imagines himself as one of the central characters.

Now, I've seen productions in which the whole business of putting on a play is simply scrapped, and Sly just dreams the main action with himself as the star of it. I've seen others, plenty of them, in which he watches the play and keeps interrupting it, courtesy of some scenes from an old Elizabethan text that never made it into the First Folio.

I've never before seen a production in which he is a spectator and a dreamer simultaneously. But that's the idea here, and the result is a mess. And that's even without mentioning the show's raison d'etre, which is that this time 'round Sly doesn't imagine himself to be Petruchio; that role goes to the actress formerly known as the Hostess. Sly himself plays the Shrew.

The point of this gender-bending is fairly obvious; Sly, the unthinking misogynist, finds out what it's like to be on the receiving end. By the time he gets to the long speech extolling the subjection of women, he's feeling traumatized and/or ashamed of himself; he keeps stammering on the word "woman." The result, paradoxically, is that the speech, which is usually guaranteed to make every man in the audience cringe, slips painlessly by; the actor is doing our suffering for us.

This Kate, by the way, never looks like a woman; he can't afford to, as he has keep popping back into bed to double as Sly. (I know that in Shakespeare's day Kate would have been played by a boy -- or, if you believe Timothy Findley, by a young man -- but that's not the convention here.) My children assumed that Katherine was her father's son, and were puzzled by the lines that kept telling them otherwise.

I mention this because production ideas like this are always announced as making Shakespeare more accessible, when what they're actually doing is making him impenetrable. Their only appeal is as mild titillation for people who know the plays already. And isn't High Park, in particular, supposed to be catering to new audiences?

Sometimes the casting seems, even by the production's own lights, counter-productive. When this Petruchio turns up for his wedding, he's wearing a dress; think how much more discomfiting that would be, if he really were a man.

The two leads, Jordan Pettle and Yanna McIntosh, are pretty good, and would probably be very interesting if they reversed roles. As it is, they and their director find subtleties in their first scene together that escape most performances. After that they settle down to rough-and-tumble, which in this production becomes an equal- opportunity pastime. (Your average Petruchio never lays a finger on his partner, for the very good reason that Shakespeare never tells him to. She does, however, hit him. She also hits other people. By the end of the play, she isn't doing this any more. So maybe her taming is for the best. So thinks Germaine Greer, at any rate when she wrote The Female Eunuch.)

The production displays what, in the wake of Beaver, I am coming to recognize as one of this director's trademarks: a fondness for playing important scenes in cramped, remote corners of the stage. The text is played at surprising, even pedantic, length, though there's some welcome streamlining towards the end. Supporting male characters wear funny hats and funny voices, while sister Bianca, whom her admirers call "a modest maid," struts through the action in a pink halter and hot pants. Maybe she's a projection of Sly's male fantasy; I can't think of any other excuse. When her suitors make their rival bids for her hand, neon lights start chasing each other round some hanging rectangular panels; it looks like the scene has suddenly been transported to Honest Ed's. Roy Lewis has some welcome authority as Baptista and the introductory Lord, and Louis Negin is momentarily and unusually touching as the bemused Vincentio.

A play that usually emerges on stage as one of the funniest and least boring in the canon failed on Sunday night to raise a single full-throated laugh. After Romancin' the One I Love and now this, even the loudest haters of The Taming of the Shrew must concede that it has suffered enough. Even if it hasn't, the audience has.