The
Taming Of The Shrew, like
The
Merchant Of Venice, has its problems for modern viewers
amplified when staged at Shakespeare’s Globe. Does a director give in
to the audience’s determined eagerness for comedy, or rather take them
on at the risk of losing them with a serious treatment of the issues of
sexism and oppression?
Caroline Byrne sets out to tread a canny and clever line. She takes the
Irish Easter Rising as her inspiration (just after its centenary), and
in particular the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic’s commitment
to equal rights as between men and women. The framing device of the
play proper, involving the tinker Christopher Sly, is here replaced by
a ballad written by Morna Regan, sung by the contemporary cast before
and after morphing into Irishfolk of a century ago.
It’s a brilliant concept, marred by only one slight problem: I, as an
Irishman with a lifetime’s experience of watching and interpreting
stage productions closely, didn’t get a whiff of it. The nationality
and the period (roughly), yes, but any relationship to that moment of
idealism, much less a sense of the ballad acting as a bridge between
that world and this... nope, sorry. So how much sense it’s going to
make to a lay viewer is anybody’s guess.
What I did see was an energetic and committed performance as Kate by
Aoife Duffin (especially as she is a short-notice replacement), never
being genuinely “reformed” by Edward MacLiam’s bellowing, frankly
unstable Petruchio, but sullenly persuaded to humour him as the only
way forward. Hardly, in itself, a counsel either of resolve or even
hope. The comedy, meanwhile, is supplied in the subplot involving
Kate’s more conspicuously marriageable sister, with Aaron Heffernan as
disguised suitor Lucentio and the ever-delightful Imogen Doel
cross-cast as his servant Tranio, who in turn is disguised as Lucentio.
(It all makes sense, at least for Shakespearean comedy values of
“sense”.)
Reading up on the production afterwards has made me much more impressed
by it. But one of the core points about a stage show is that if you
need to read up to understand it, then it’s not doing the job itself.
Written for the Financial
Times.