The Taming of the Shrew was the first Shakespeare play I saw on stage that wasn’t a history. Though, funnily enough, the play itself is described in its Induction as “a kind of history” – for the benefit of Christopher Sly, the drunken tinker for whose benefit the play proper is performed and who seems perplexed by the word “comedy”. He pronounces it “comonty”. Once again I have to thank my father who announced one day that he was taking me to... Stratford-on-Avon for a summer holiday. We spent a week there and had a great time; apart from plays, and visits to the regulation Shakespearean sites, I recall side trips to such nearby towns as Warwick, Kenilworth and Oxford; the renting of bikes for a day in the country; and some great meals at the Swan’s Nest Hotel. We didn’t book theatre seats in advance; we just turned up at the box office the day we arrived, and bought – well, my dad bought – tickets for that evening’s show, which happened to be The Taming of the Shrew. It also happened to be the first night. I loved it.

The year was 1954. The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre was going through a golden period. For much of its existence (it started in 1879) it had not been taken very seriously, its productions being mostly thought rushed and second-rate. That had changed at the end of the Second World War; and since 1949 the company had been led, very successfully, by the actor and director Anthony Quayle. In 1953 he was joined as artistic director by Glen Byam Shaw, the man responsible for the memorable Old Vic Henry V that had got me started four years before. At that point Byam Shaw had been one of three associate directors at the Vic, responsible among other things for that theatre’s highly esteemed acting school; the others were George Devine, director and occasional actor, and the French maestro Michel Saint-Denis.  Then everything went sour; the triumvirate resigned and the school closed down. When Byam Shaw went to Stratford, he naturally took with him some of his Old Vic actors, and he also gave productions to Devine, whose career was soon to take a surprising new turn; in 1956 he became the founding artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre in London and the patron saint of a new and incendiary generation of British playwrights.  The 1954 Shrew was a revival, with an almost entirely new cast, of a Devine production from the previous season. Stratford in the 50s ran on stars – there was usually at least one knight or dame heading the company – but ’54 was an exception; it was explicitly given over to newer, younger talents. The Shrew revival cast was thus, on paper, less illustrious than its predecessor; it was nevertheless generally thought to be superior. (“What had gone well now went better” wrote one Stratford historian.) Not that any of this would have meant much to my ten-year old self. I did, though, recognise one name in the programme that had stayed with me from Henry V; it was that of Leo McKern, now playing Petruchio’s servant Grumio, the play’s plum low-comedy role. He was great.

I knew the play, at least superficially, from reading it; so I wasn’t surprised to encounter Christopher Sly at the start of it. I was taken aback, though, by his persistence. In the text I’d read he, and the people tricking him into the belief that he’s a lord recently awoken from a trance, are permitted just one brief exchange after the first scene of the play-within-the-play, followed by the stage-direction “they sit and mark”. So I was pretty sure that after the first intermission (plays usually had two of them in those days) I would return to find that the sitting and marking were over, and that Sly and company had vanished from the stage. Not a bit of it: there they were, reacting uproariously, though without pulling focus from the main action: the inset stories of Petruchio and Katharina, and of Kate’s sister Bianca and her rival suitors. And there was an epilogue: Sly was discovered lying on the ground outside the inn whose hostess had ejected him at the beginning of the show. She now reappeared, to warn him that his wife would give him hell when he got home. To which he replied, not a bit of it: “I know now how to tame a shrew”.

I subsequently learned that that line, that epilogue, and much of the other additional Sly stuff came from another, anonymous, play with a near-identical title:  The Taming of a Shrew, either a source for Shakespeare’s comedy or, more likely, a contemporary rip-off of it. Anyway, the additions made the play more of a rounded whole, as well as being very entertaining in their own right. Devine, it turned out, was far from the first director to include them, and he was certainly not the last. Critics, and even some directors, insist on referring to the Shrew’s “rarely played Induction” but I can recall only one production that didn’t include it in some form.

My first Sly lived up to his name. He was James Grout, a then-young actor (promoted during rehearsals, I believe) whom I was to re-encounter in subsequent decades as one of Britain’s best character men. I can still hear him, in my mind’s ear, delivering his last homeward-bound line, like a man who had just discovered swagger. I can also summon his proud delight when he succumbed to the belief that he was indeed a lord just released from a coma of fifteen years (“by my fay, a goodly nap”) and the way in which he chased the alarmed page drafted to play his lady (“madam, undress you and come now to bed”), all around the room and over the bed, not to mention the liquorous and lecherous chuckle with which he signalled his agreement to “tarry, in despite of the flesh and the blood”.  I also remember the real nobleman who supervised his delusion giving his name as Simon, and the friendly relish with which Sly addressed him thereafter as “Sim”. And I remember, at the height of the mayhem in Petruchio’s household, how when one of the panic-stricken servants called out to his fellows “away, away, for he is coming hither” Sly, quite carried away, attempted to join them in their flight.

In fact, I’m amazed by how much of this production has stayed with me: the first in my Shakespeare-going , indeed my theatre-going, experience of which I could say that. I think of Bianca’s rival suitors overlapping a couple of their lines so as to lay simultaneous claim to her. I remember Gremio, the older of the two, rather touchingly acknowledging that he didn’t have the funds to compete, and then rallying fiercely at a sign of weakness from the competition. (The actor was Edward Atienza, a young man very good at playing old. He was also delightfully gobsmacked when confronted by Petruchio’s claims of prowess as a lion-tamer.) I relished the politely taken-aback  response of Baptista (Raymond Westwell) when asked whether he had a daughter caIled Katharina, fair and virtuous: “I have a daughter, sir, called Katharina.” I enjoyed the play’s two straight men, Lucentio (Basil Hoskins) and Tranio (John Turner), seizing on the few comic or ironic lines they were allowed. I have vivid memories of Petruchio and Katharina on the road to Padua, and the way in which Mc Kern’s Grumio promptly turned around when Petruchio threatened to return home because of his wife’s refusal to call the sun the moon: a gag that was repeated, to even better effect, just before the play’s last scene. Sharper still is the memory of Kate capping that moment by telling a bewildered traveller that her eyes had been “bedazzled with the – sun?” and looking at Petruchio to check that she was playing the game right, and Petruchio’s gratified nod of assent. And I can still summon up the image of the guests at the concluding wedding-feast standing and raising their glasses on high as the central couple mounted a staircase to their final exit. My overall memory is of a delightfully colourful, funny production.

By some later lights it was also, I have to admit, an escapist one. Though, even at the time, The Taming of the Shrew was widely regarded as a problematic play. “A first night is a first night”, said my dad, “even at Stratford”. So the following Sunday we read the reviews. They were enthusiastic; The Observer commended the production for making a potentially uncomfortable play palatable; the Sunday Times was even more effusive about the production (it singled out all the performances that I had liked) but called the play not only “brutal” but “ill-written”. The Times critic thought the text had only four good lines, which I think unfair, though I do applaud his choice of “there’s small choice in rotten apples” as one of them. (He was the legendary Harold Hobson who was still on the job when I became the Observer critic twenty years later.) The central couple in the Stratford production were Barbara Jefford and Keith Michell, two names that didn’t mean anything to me at the time but soon would. Michell, an Old Vic School graduate (and Australian, like McKern) was the primary swashbuckling actor of his generation: a natural D’Artagnan or Cyrano.  I was soon to see Jefford, who matched him in fieriness and humour, playing an extraordinary succession of other Shakespearean heroines at the Vic itself.  They took what would now be called a rom-com approach to their relationship in Shrew: love at first sight but strenuously denied. This, I’ve noticed over the years, is how this scene nearly always plays out, even in purportedly edgy productions, perhaps because that’s how it’s written. The matter is clinched early on when Petruchio addresses Katharina as “the prettiest Kate in Christendom”.  “Kate” seems to have been Shakespeare’s favourite term of endearment, as illustrated in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry V and perhaps most revealingly in Henry VIII where the king utters it when overcome by admiration for the wife whom he’s trying to divorce. In Henry IV Part One Hotspur calls his wife Kate, even though her historical name was Elizabeth; and their marriage is often cited as the only happy one in Shakespeare. Though, by the end of their play, Petruchio and Katharina seem to be heading in that direction. Shrew may be unique among classic comedies in marrying off its central characters half-way through the action, rather than sometime after the final curtain. Though you could argue that their relationship only becomes a real marriage at the end of the penultimate scene: when they find affectionate common ground in their bemusement at the antics of the characters in the sub-plot: “Husband, let’s in to see the end of this ado” “First kiss me, Kate, and then we will”.  Cole Porter and his colleagues knew what they were doing when they chose the title for their Shrew musical: a show incidentally which also presents the Shakespearean action as a play within a play.

My second Shrew was as enjoyable as my first, and resembled it in many ways. It was in 1961, and was presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, their London base for many years. Curiously, it had no named director. It was a revival of a Stratford-on-Avon production from the previous year that had ostensibly been directed by John Barton; “ostensibly” because Barton, a former Cambridge academic, was working for the first time with professional actors and they found him dictatorial. Peter Hall, in his capacity as artistic director, had to take over the show. (In later years, Barton became a superb director of Shakespeare.) The Stratford Petruchio was Peter O’Toole, who was just hitting stardom. His Kate was far more experienced: Dame Peggy Ashcroft, a surprise choice as she was generally considered too old for the role and, more importantly, too refined. In the event, her performance was hailed as a revelation, a departure perhaps from a tradition of spitfire Kates. Kenneth Tynan wrote of the “eager, sensible radiance” with which she delivered the notorious submission speech in the last scene.  The actress who took over the role in the London remount was radiance personified: Vanessa Redgrave, whose Stratford Rosalind a few months before had made her a legend at the age of 24. As far as I remember, she delivered the big speech without irony but with enchanting grace and humour. Derek Godfrey’s Petruchio, in contrast, breathed irony, that being this actor’s natural and most agreeable mode. The play has the richest assortment of supporting roles of any of the comedies, and this production fielded a great team.

So did the next RSC production which, again, I saw at the Aldwych, in 1967: a young Trevor Nunn directed it (his first solo Shakespearean flight for the company) with his then-wife Janet Suzman as Katharina and Michael Williams as a cheeky bantamweight Petruchio: an unusual and effective re-alignment of forces. There was also an endearingly battered Baptista from one of Britain’s top comedy actors of the time, Roy Kinnear. This was Nunn’s first solo flight as a Stratford Shakespeare director, and it served notice of one of his greatest talents, that of fostering joyous comic invention among his actors, sometimes in places where no-one else has looked; “where’s my spaniel Troilus?” asks Petruchio when he brings his bride home, an inquiry that sent his servants, a surprising number of them aged and apparently toothless, scurrying all over the stage, sometimes crouching and whistling, trying to lure the absent hound. Time stood still.

These were all bucolic productions, as was an irreverent one at the Young Vic some years later, one that spiced up the text from time to time and found a new role, literally, for Sly; the players, finding themselves short-handed, thrust the Penguin edition into his hands and had him read the role of the Pedant. (He took to it like a trouper.) Later productions, of a sterner political bent, have played more radical games with the bemused tinker. Both at the English Stratford in 1976 and the Canadian one in 2015, Sly’s role was doubled with that of Petruchio, the hopeful tamer finding his wishes fulfilled (or not) by the actual one. Both productions began with the actor invading the auditorium, drunk and disorderly. Jonathan Pryce, the RSC Petruchio, was so convincing a disruptor that one took to wondering if he had been fired during previews and had returned to wreak revenge; the impression only began to dissolve at realisation that the usherette trying to bar his way was Paola Dionisotti, the actress who would be playing Katharina. The initial trick even worked when seen for a second time. What followed in Michael Bogdanov’s production had to be taken as Sly’s drunken dream. In Chris Abraham’s Ontario version the play-within remained a performance, though the players who performed it were doing so on their own initiative, rather than to oblige an anonymous Lord at the end of a day’s hunting ; still, the player who took charge of this was, again, the actress who would play Kate: interesting that she would choose this of all plays. But then she seemed to have her own take on it: not subversive, exactly, but multi-layered. Both the leads (actual husband-and-wife Ben Carlson and Deborah Hay) came over as people anxious to shed the personalities they were obliged to assume, while playing them, for the time being, to the hilt.  It’s notable that the anonymous Taming of a Shrew manages to have it both ways; the play proper is presented as a performance, but Sly ends up believing it was a dream.

However it’s played or adapted, the Induction has the effect of framing the play, making it either more palatable or more disturbing, depending on the production’s choices or on the tenor of the times (which may be the same thing). There is another way of furnishing a frame, one exemplified by an RSC production of 1987, directed by Jonathan Miller (his only work with this company). This was the one version I have seen that dispensed entirely with the Induction. It was also the only one to be set and costumed, rigorously, in the Elizabethan period, with Brian Cox’s Petruchio a serious puritan whose treatment of Fiona Shaw’s Katharina was in accordance with his own exacting creed. This distanced the play in a good way, allowing us to take it on its own terms and then to judge those terms. Miller had already directed the play in this way for BBC TV with John Cleese as Petruchio:  great casting if only he could have handled the verse.

The Bogdanov production had also presented a picture of a society, but this time strictly in modern dress. One of its highlights was the competitive wooing of Bianca, or rather of her father. It was a bidding war, each suitor capping the other’s offers of money and property, until a final outlandish bid made Baptista’s portable calculator explode. This may be the most inventive and instructive thing any production has done with the play’s subplot, which admittedly is thinly written: conceivably by a collaborator, though I think it’s likelier that in this early play Shakespeare was aping an established style of Italianate comedy, crammed with intrigue. (Four separate disguises are involved: a Shakespearean record.) Studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama frequently describe a play’s sub-plot as a critique of its main plot. Here it seems to work the other way around: Bianca and her admirers are superficial compared to Petruchio and Katharina.

Distaste for the play has sometimes spilled over into aesthetic objections. Some recent British reviews have even called it “boring”. This, in my experience, is something it never is. Well, as a certain captain would say, hardly ever.