Conall Morrison's production is the
most deliberately unpleasant version of this play that I have seen in
performance. However, one's disquiet at the unremitting sexual
hostility gives way to a similar unsettlement at not being able to see
Morrison's point. The production has power, but I'm blowed if I can see
where it's directed.
Laughter tends to die in our throats after the interval, when it
becomes unmistakable that Petruchio (Stephen Boxer)'s method of
"taming" Kate is not a perverse stratagem that he adopts but rather an
indulgence of his own psychosis. When Kate gives in to him, it is
neither capitulation to her lord and master nor (as increasingly played
now) a coming together in happy collusion; no, this is the realisation
that her survival depends on humouring him at any cost. Michelle Gomez
is a natural Kate, terrifyingly comic in her initial tantrums, like the
offspring of Diamanda Galás and Hylda Baker. Gomez also brings
heft to the latter phase: we see her acquire a worrying stillness, her
eyes always fixed somewhere beyond her physical surroundings, and when
she delivers her final speech, advocating wifely subjection to the
play's other two brides, she does so with the paralysed acquiescence of
a former minister reciting his spurious confession at a Stalinist show
trial.
So, this is a sex war. And an all-out war, as well: in that final
scene, the other two couples are at daggers drawn, wives as well as
husbands… why? What is behind the gradual modernisation of costume from
doublet-and-hose to broadly contemporary (although there are always
blips; why?) just as hostilities reach their climax? Is it intended to
suggest that sexism has not improved at all over the centuries? Really,
not one bit? Or is it all part of the prank played on Christopher Sly –
for here, the play's often-jettisoned Induction (in which an
unconscious drunkard is dressed as a nobleman and on his awakening is
codded that his memories of life as a tinker are the lingering effects
of a madness) is taken up again at the close, with Sly/Petruchio
stripped of his finery by the Lady (not a Lord in this version) and her
retinue, and left to shiver alone and ashamed? And why does the Lady
double, without a costume change, as one of Kate's "opponent" brides?
When black actor Larrington Walker is cast as a merchant who
impersonates a white character's father, is Morrison making a point
about racism as well as sexism (a point which is too subtle for the
audience to spot, as evidenced by peals of uncomplicated laughter at
black and white characters doing the same cartoon Jamaicanisms), or has
he a great blind spot as to how this reverberates upon the sexual
prejudice? As I say, blowed if I know.
Written for the Financial
Times.