Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
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by William Shakespeare, directed by Peter Hinton
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
May 31-October 25, 2008
"By this reck'ning he is more shrew than she" (IV, i)
The Stratford Festival’s current production of “The Taming of the Shrew” directed by Peter Hinton presents a such deliberate misreading of the text that there is no “taming” in his version and no “shrew”. One might have thought “political correctness” had died out in the 1990s, but not with Hinton, whose interpretation does even make enough sense to fit in with James Finn Garner’s “Politically Correct Bedtime Tales” (1994).
To start with, Hinton includes the Induction. That, in itself is a good thing since it is part of the part though it is rarely performed. In the Induction a nameless Lord comes upon the soundly sleeping Christopher Sly, who has just been throw out of an alehouse for not paying his bills. The Lord has the idea of transferring Sly to his manor and having him wake to splendour where everyone will treat him as a lord. He has his page Bartholomew disguise himself as a woman to play Sly’s “wife” who is overjoyed that Sly has finally awakened from a seven-year-long coma. Players arrive and they all go to see the play which happens to be “The Taming of the Shrew.” What the Induction provides is a framework for the play that emphasizes role-playing both in the theatre and in life. This in turn emphasizes the importance of role-playing in “Shrew” that makes us view “shrewishness” and “misogyny” as stances Shakespeare is using rather than advocating.
Unfortunately, Hinton is not content with that. He decides, perhaps under the influence of Timothy Findley’s “Elizabeth Rex” (2000), that the “Lord” should be no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth I herself. At first she, her two huntsmen, Sly and his “wife”, watch the play. Then, for unknown reasons, they begin to act in it, with Elizabeth playing the Widow, the First Huntsman the Pedant, the Second Huntsman Vincentio and, most strange of all, Sly as the servant Joseph and a Hawker. Among numerous questions is why Hinton bothers to perform the Induction if he then undoes it by having the tinker turned lord go back to playing lower class roles.
Hinton reserves his major lunacy for the play itself. In Act 2, Scene 1, Petruchio says to Kate, “Why does the world report that Kate doth limp? O sland'rous world!” This, like the other flaws in Kate, noted in the speech is meant to be metaphorical or at least taken as a joke. Hinton, however, takes it literally and thus forces Irene Poole as Kate to limp throughout the show as if she had suffered polio in childhood and has one leg shorter than the other. One hopes Poole has a good physiotherapist. Kate may rail against men and mistreat her sister, but Hinton makes clear that this is because Baptista rejects her embraces and does not love her and instead dotes on perfect little Bianca. All this psychologizing based on one line of the play means that Kate is not a shrew at all but rather an unfortunate woman who rails because she has grown up without a father’s love. Contrary to all other productions, when she first meets Petruchio, she instantly falls in love with him and he with her as emphasized by a clichéd ting of the triangle in the orchestra. Thus, not only do we have no shrew but she does not need taming .
Besides making nonsense of Shakespeare’s play, Hinton’s approach drains it of all humour. The entire sequence of “taming” scenes at Petruchio’s house tmake an egocentric man’s mistreatment of a handicapped woman gruesome, not funny. Hinton’s Kate finally submits to Petruchio’s whims because she has been so starved for good treatment she will do anything to receive it. If Hinton thinks he is making a feminist statement he is wrong because this Kate, unlike others, does not fight against submission but willingly embraces it. His conception thus completely backfires.
As if this all these alterations were not enough, Hinton has decided that Petruchio’s servant Grumio should be played by a woman (Lucy Peacock). When Petruchio arrives for his wedding, she pulls him on in a cart as if she were his horse. The point is obviously to show that Petruchio treats women as chattel, but Hinton does nothing more with the situation. In fact, he assigns Peacock an Elizabethan song toward the end about a woman who laments being alone, which, yet again undermines intent of the cross gender casting.
His staging, too, is a mixture of the pointless and peculiar. Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s unadorned stage already pretty well looks like a stage. But Hinton, not satisfied with it has had designer Santo Loquasto cover the entire surface with rough boards and create a raised dais at the very downstage edge of the playing area. Not only does this mean that actors need ladders to climb onto the stage from the voms, but anyone sitting in the front row expecting a clear view will be surprised that the stage surface has risen to eye level. As with the other two Shakespeares at the Festival Theatre this year, the staircases and balcony are missing. In this case, Loquasto has replaced them with a two-storey house front. In Act 4 the front is rolled out onto the stage revealing the entire skeleton of a house. One might think that if Hinton demands such a set he would make use of it, but, no, all the scenes involving Kate and the servants are played on the small dais in front of the house, just one example of many that Hinton has staged the play as if it were on a proscenium not a thrust stage.
As for costuming, Hinton has set the Induction and the play in the Elizabethan period and Loquasto has responded with suitably lavish costumes. However, by the end of the play when the Paduans are celebrating the arrival of Kate and Petruchio and the weddings of Bianca and the Widow, Hinton has the worthies appear in black Puritan garb, nothing like their colourful Renaissance wear earlier. The only explanation for this bizarre costume choice is that Hinton mentions in his programme note that the English Puritans advocated equal rights for women. This idea only makes such costuming a more absurd idea especially for the play’s conclusion. During the test of the three wives, the three are meant to be backstage. Hinton, however, places them on his downstage dais. The only problem is that Shakespeare has written no dialogue for the wives so that when Biondello comes for each all he can do is stare at each one who stares back at him after which he reports what she “said”. Since we see that none of them actually “say” anything, we either have to assume Biondello is lying or that Hinton has made yet another obvious blunder in staging.
Within the confines of such a perverse interpretation, the strong cast give uniformly fine performances. It would be wonderful to see Evan Buliung and Irene Poole as Petruchio and Kate have it out in a conventional production since they both have the right intensity and vitality for the roles. Adrienne Gould makes a lovely Bianca and Jeff Lillico an attractive Lucentio. Stephen Ouimette as Baptista, Juan Chioran as Gremio and Randy Hughson as Hortensio make a fine trio of eccentric older men. Ben Carlson as Tranio clearly is a servant smarter than his master and Lucy Peacock as Grumio, despite the odd casting and the directors’ uncertainty what her real relation is to Petruchio, turns in a very sympathetic performance. Only the effeminate, limp-wristed Biondello of Patrick McManus is grating. Despite the oddity of the Induction Barbara Fulton is excellent as Queen Elizabeth and it is a pleasure to hear her sing the many songs assigned her. Ins Choi is also very fine as Sly, so much so that we wish Shakespeare had written a postscript to the play so that we find out what finally happens to him. Of course, Hinton could have shown us that in dumbshow, but does not.
With so many bewildering decisions in interpretation, casting and staging, only those who want to see Peter Hinton’s “Taming of the Shrew” not Shakespeare’s should waste their time with this mess. Instead of forcing Shakespeare’s play into a mold it does fit, if Hinton had wanted a play that reverses Shakespeare’s “Shrew”, he should have asked to direct John Fletcher’s once-popular 1611 sequel to “Shrew” called “The Tamer Tam’d”.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Irene Poole and Evan Buliung. ©David Hou.
2008-06-02
The Taming of the Shrew