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by Manos Angelakis
production photograph by Simon Annand
“The Taming of the Shrew”
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Courtyard Theater
Southern Lane
Stratford-Upon-Avon
In repertory until September 25, 2008.
On a recent trip to the heart of England, i.e. Warwickshire, Staffordshire, West Midlands, Birmingham, Herefordshire, etc., I was lucky enough to be presented with a ticket to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Courtyard Theater for a performance of “The Taming of the Shrew”, one of The Bard’s earliest plays.
It is hard to figure out why director Conall Morisson decided to present this familiar Shakespearean tale the way he did. Frankly, I think that trying to rewrite Shakespeare’s staging is a very poor directorial endeavor.
Having said that, I enjoyed the performance with the beautiful Michelle Gomez as Katherina, the shrew of the title character, and Stephen Boxer, as Petruchio her husband. But, I found the director’s attempt to modernize the play by bringing the opening and close to modern day, while the central segment is played in period costume, unsuccessful and extremely confusing. The play-within-a-play technique is used extensively by Shakespeare to advance his stories, but in this case, the change of the play and timeline from present to the past and back to the present, makes the transition confusing. Additionally, Morisson’s direction of Tranio and The Merchant (a marginal character) to affect exaggerated Jamaican accents and mannerisms - which Keir Charles (playing Tranio) lost halfway through the play - also showed poor directorial judgment.
Gender, power, and language are the important themes in “The Taming of the Shrew”. Subjugation of women who are considered too combative in their language and thinking is the main subject of the play. The 16th and 17th centuries was a time when debate raged about what constitutes appropriate feminine comportment contrasting an earlier, courtly tradition, with newer puritanical thought. The aristocratic tradition valued eloquence and wit in both sexes. Conversation was considered an art form. The bourgeois tradition by contrast, considered the intellectual competition between the sexes unseemly and a symptom of the decadence of the aristocracy. For them, women displayed their virtue by being “seen and not heard”.
In this play, Katherina suffers at the hands of her husband and his manservant more than just verbal abuse. She is denied food and sleep – a classic brainwashing technique – until she learns to agree with her husband’s even most absurd statements (that day is night, or the sun is the moon); she learns it is not in her best interest to challenge her husband’s pronouncements. By the end of the play, she has lost her combativeness towards her husband but has not lost her ability to construct an argument. In the ending, most unsettling to the female journalists I was with, it is Katherina herself that delivers the closing speech, using her rhetorical skill to promote the case for male supremacy and female subjugation. A view of a male-female relationship that to this modern viewer seems exceedingly bleak.
The Courtyard Theater is currently the only operating stage in the Royal Shakespeare Theater complex. The main stage, along with the Swan Theater, is in the midst of a reconstruction that will update the 1932 Elisabeth Scott structure to become “the best modern playhouse for Shakespeare in the world”.
At the heart of the project is a new 1,000-seat thrust-stage auditorium that wraps the audience around three sides of the stage, the same type of design that was prototyped in the Courtyard auditorium. The old design used a proscenium arch that kept the furthest seats some 29 yards away from the actors. The new thrust-stage design will almost half that distance, bringing the audience and actors much closer. Many key heritage areas are retained and restored, including the Art Deco foyer, theater façade, and Fountain staircase. A linking foyer sided by a new colonnade will be joining together the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theaters. Improved audience facilities, including elevator access to all levels, a rooftop restaurant, exhibition space and much better restrooms are also included in this £112.8 million project. Demolition started in April 2007, and construction is expected to be completed by 2010.
In the meantime, the Courtyard Theater, maintains a full schedule of performances that include “The Merchant of Venice” with Angus Wright as Shylock and Georgina Rich as Portia; the aforementioned “Taming of the Shrew”; “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with Joe Dixon as Bottom and Mark Hadfield as Puck; the much awaited “Hamlet” with David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius; “Romeo and Juliet” directed by Neil Bartlett; and “Love’s Labour Lost” with David Tennant as Berowne, directed by Gregory Doran. Many of the plays will be in repertory until mid-November, and Romeo and Juliet, until January 24, 2009.
© July 2008 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
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