✭✭✩✩✩

by William Shakespeare, directed by David Ferry

ShakespeareWorks, Home Depot Theatre, Toronto

June 29-August 7, 2005

ShakespeareWorks’ second production at the handsome Home Depot Theatre is a beautiful looking but largely unintelligible production of The Taming of the Shrew.  Director David Ferry has reset the action in 1913 Italy and designer Kelly Wolf has complied with detailed period costumes in summery tones.  Then, for reasons unknown, Ferry has a Hitler lookalike make an appearance.  (Did Ferry actually mean 1931?)  The actors spend the majority of the play shouting their lines so that the production is not only unsubtle but the words can’t be heard clearly.  It’s rather like watching a movie on TV over static.

Ferry deals with the play’s notorious misogyny by linking the harsh behaviour of Petruchio (Paulino Nunes) to grief over his father’s death.  The shrewish Katharina (Elizabeth Saunders) gives her final speech of submission out of real love for Petruchio, apparently because she realizes he’s as mixed up as she is. 

This might work if the performances were convincing, but they are not.  Nunes delivers his lines as if he were reading the phone book.  The words are there, but what’s their meaning?  Saunders shouts so much she gives us no clue that Katharina has a complex personality.  Only Marion Day as Katharina’s younger sister Bianca and Stewart Arnott as Bianca’s would-be suitor Gremio know how to speak verse properly and give their characters nuance.  When physical comedy is involved Dylan Roberts’s Biondello steals the show.  If ShakespeareWorks truly wants to meet its educational goals its productions will have to be much more clearly spoken and directed. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-07-07.

Photo: Elizabeth Saunders standing over Paulino Nunes.