Wiving it Wealthily

The Taming of the Shrew
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

I have deferred reviewing The Taming of the Shrew (Aldwych), partly out of sheer funk. I know I enjoyed the production but I am not sure how to interpret it. I judge from other reviews that my confusion is shared. I fancy the director, Michael Bogdanov, is none too clear himself.

The observable facts about the production are that it is uncommonly lively and inventive, that it is performed in modern dress, and that there is a shock effect at each end of it. For once it is more unfair to give away the beginning than the close. If I told you that the show opens with Jonathan Pryce, apparently drunk, clambering on to the stage and demolishing the set before subsiding into a dream that consists of the rest of the play with himself in the role of Petruchio, you would never forgive me. But it is important to reveal that in the last scene Paola Dionosotti plays Katharina’s famous (or infamous) speech of submission with such apparent sincerity that when she reaches the line about putting her hand beneath her husband’s foot, and actually does so, he, with a guilty or embarrassed shudder, pushes it aside.

Note my equivocations: ‘apparent sincerity’, ‘guilty or embarrassed.’ The variant readings implied have all cropped up in reviews, and I hesitate to choose between them. However you take the moment, it remains an arresting one, that compels you to think about the play and what has gone before, and for that all praise to Mr Bogdanov. Much praise anyway.

Before I proceed, allow me to remark on a peculiarity of this comedy. Whenever it is presented the reviewers, who have appallingly short memories, congratulate the director concerned on having made it, for the first time in their experience, palatable and even enjoyable. I think it’s time to give credit to the play itself. I have never seen a boring production of The Shrew, that makes it pretty unique in the canon, and suggests to me that it is a theatrical masterpiece. 

Another point about it, much neglected by contemporary commentators: it’s a romance. This fact is why it always works. Petruchio and Katharina are funds of energy and therefore immensely attractive; whatever he does to her, or she to anybody else, it is impossible for an audience not to want to see them united.

At Stratford last year I thought Mr Bogdanov appreciated this point, and I applauded him. Now I am less sure. I don’t really know what he’s at. The relationship seems to proceed by disconnected stages. At first Kate, as usual, snarls at everybody (and is given the usual justification of a spoiled-brat younger sister). Then she meets Petruchio, fights with him, and- again as usual- rather likes him. Then we halt; the news that she is to be married out-of-hand, without any consultation, appals her and the relationship stops dead. Then come the familiar taming scenes, played by Mr Pryce with a touch more venom than is customary; Miss Dionosotti gives out howls of suffering but doesn’t really look too famished. And so to the end: already described and ambiguous.

The production actually batters Miss Dionosotti worse than Petruchio does, and she cannot find a line to link her powerful individual moments. Mr Pryce, being steel and mercury, survives better, but Petruchio as the aggressor is the easier role; his reactions are hardly in question.

The production is at its strongest in establishing the play’s monetary climate. Petruchio has come to wive in wealthy Padua; Bianca’s suitors make rival bids for her hand; and Baptista weighs up their respective offers on a pocket calculator. The final banquet is very much a successful feast of men: brandy and cigars at a green-baize table, which of course is a perfect setting for the concluding wagers on wifely obedience.

Michael Billington in the Guardian, while praising the presentation of this scene, has declared the it has nothing ‘anything to do with the play that Shakespeare wrote.’ Au contraire; it may not be the play he intended (we could argue about that for centuries) but, of the words he wrote and the actions they imply, it is an exact and acute rendition. So is most of Mr Bogdanov’s mise en scene; it is the characterization that is periodically wrenched out of true. That, too, at any given moment may be true to the text, or a defensible reading of it; that is always a matter of choice, but the choices here are not always compatible.

Mr Billington goes on to champion ‘the right of any director to interpret a play according to the beliefs of himself or his age.’ Well, if it’s really a question of his own beliefs, fine; nice to meet a man who has some. But merely to adhere to ‘the beliefs of one’s age’ is craven conformism.

‘A scholar,’ Mr Billington eloquently states, ‘is free to propound his views on the printed page. Why should not a director have the same freedom on a wooden stage?’ Actually a scholar’s liberty is strictly limited; he has to base his car strictly on the facts (in this case, the text); otherwise, whatever he is engaged in is certainly not scholarship. Anyway, an essay on a play is a tangent to it in a way that a production (unless it defines its terms very carefully) cannot be; it has to embody the play, not just comment on it. When author and director are visibly at war, it’s the audience that loses.

This is not to join with the cut-price Bardolaters who claim that Shakespeare’s meaning is obvious; on the contrary, it takes hard work to discover it. That work is known in the theatre as rehearsal. To go to the trouble  of finding meaning, and then throw it away, is profligate; and few directors, to do them justice and however they may theorise, would in practice proceed that way. At his best, Mr Bogdanov (like John Barton in his Merchant of Venice with its unsympathetic Shylock, now at the Warehouse) has dug out the play’s situation and put it on the stage in front of us. We can then interpret it according to our beliefs, and if it shocks us, well maybe Shakespeare isn’t dead after all.