Abstract
For its twenty-fourth summer season, the itinerant troupe Illyria took The Taming of the Shrew throughout Great Britain and into the Netherlands. The handout indicated that the audience should bring seating/rugs, warm clothes and picnic and that performances would be only cancelled in the event of hurricanes. In the grounds of The Coniston Institute and Ruskin Museum (Brantwood), the show went on despite ominously hovering low cloud that forewarned wind and rain. The threat did nothing to diminish the spirits of the performers and spectators who shared 2 hours and 20 minutes of exhilaratingly paced, thoroughly enjoyable and accessible Shakespeare, with five actors interpreting the play’s 20-odd characters on a tiny stage equipped with an even tinier balcony, often switching accents at an amazing rhythm as they did so. Since the parts were ascribed so as to revisit this Renaissance battle of the sexes (Katherina’s shrewishness was played to the ghoulish full by James Dangerfield and Petruchio was masterfully interpreted by Katie Helps), the production ingeniously thwarted stereotypes and physically as well as intellectually repositioned the play’s question of who is taming whom.
From the outset, character reversal and an inflated, or rather inverted, sense of self were at the forefront. The caricature of nobility worked both ways in the Induction, with an inebriated north-country-accented bumpkin, Christopher Sly (Alastair Chisholm), on a par with the ridiculously funny, plummy-mouthed Noble (James Dangerfield), whose equine laugh at his own jokes anticipated the self-indulgent misperception to come. Lucentio (James Dangerfield) was a lisping witless simpleton whilst the wily cockney-accented Tranio (Katie Helps) made the most of his master’s giggling excitement at the sight of Bianca (Katie Helps) – when she appeared with her sister in Pioneer dress worthy of The Little House on the Prairie – to upturn convention and dress himself in his master’s clothes. Baptista (Ffion Glyn), in top hat and ornately embroidered coat, was, despite his superior appearance, also tricked by this virile, smirking Petruchio who oozed a self-confidence that was seemingly reinforced by the equally assured Hortensio’s (India Martin’s) promises of an ill-favoured wife. Verbal warnings became visual as the snarling Nellie Oleson-ish Katherina tied her sister to the onstage balcony, drew a moustache on her face, pulled off what was obviously her sibling’s favourite teddy-bear’s head and with a huge pair of scissors cut Bianca’s braided hair off and threw her plait across the audience.
Katherina’s first encounter with the clownishly costumed Petruchio was a culture shock. Used to having her own way, this shrew was stunned at her suitor’s bossy behaviour and the comic impact was made even greater as ‘bossy’, normally applied to women, here served for a woman playing a man. The amusement peaked as the grimacing, astounded Kate heard her future fiancé boast about their wedding-to-be and began to appreciate the dichotomy between public and private self that would lead the way to the auctioning off of Bianca, by her loving father, to her adoring suitors. The dizzying impression continued as the bidders climbed the stairway to the top of the balcony as they upped their offers – the balcony later served for the Latin lesson, to allow the simpering Lucentio/Cambio to explain his disguise and gleefully overlook the unfortunate Hortensio/Licio as he was jilted by Bianca. Katherina and Petruchio’s wedding day was just as farcical. As she awaited him, fiendishly growling under her veil or on the lookout, peering through huge binoculars, his fantastical arrival was announced by the rainbow-costumed Biondello (Alastair Chisholm) who hilariously told and mimed the monster-like approach of horse and rider, complete with simulated discharges and fake diseases. When the bridegroom finally arrived, in an oversized yellow top hat and patched-up blue long coat to claim his loot, Katherina trembled and shook and the audience chuckled as they shared the joke of him being ‘Kated’ (3.3) and her out-Kated – all the more so as the new bride was literally swept off her feet by a plastic-gun-toting Grumio (Alastair Chisholm) and a stunt-performing Petruchio, who rolled over backwards before kidnapping his unyielding spouse as if she were the spoils of a hold up. After the ‘madly mated’ couple left the stage the cast sang in canon and Baptista ironically invited the audience to enjoy the lovely summer’s evening for a 20-minute interval that was interrupted just before its end by a cymbal-clashing Katherina, who startled the spectators by appearing amongst them and shrieking ‘5 minutes’ before vanishing again backstage.
The shorter, second part of the performance began with Grumio arriving at Petruchio’s home from behind the spectators. After relating the journey to Curtis (India Martin) and greeting the French-accented, moustached cook Nathaniel (Ffion Glyn), a pink-dressed, mud-soaked Katherina stood immobile and speechless whilst her husband hit his petrified domestics with fake ham, threw rubber chickens across the audience or played tennis with plastic fish and oranges. The frightened servants fled left stage, the emblematic three-legged joint stool (1.1 and 2.1) serving as a shield, whilst the flabbergasted Katherina was dragged off right. Back in Padua, Hortensio expressed his resolve to wed a ‘wealthy widow’ (4.2) whilst ‘she’ (Alastair Chisholm) did a stately dance across stage, belying Tranio’s description of her as ‘lusty’: gloomy as the surrounding clouds, she was the look-alike of Whistler’s 1871 Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, also called Portrait of the Artist’s Mother. As Grumio moved again amid the audience, munching a handy picnic-table crisp to represent ‘fat tripe’ (4.3), spectators became geared up for Petruchio eating Katherina’s food, throwing her cap around the stage or wielding the astonished tailor’s yardstick as a sword. In this Petruchio’s zany world, Katherina became a (falsely?) compliant skipping, curtseying, even smiling, spouse and the white-wigged, thick-bespectacled Vincentio (India Martin) was very plausibly either a ‘lovely maid’ or a ‘man, old, wrinkled’ (4.6). The Officer (James Dangerfield) who arrested him for being the false Vincentio was a policeman complete with baton and Bobby helmet, beaten with the old man’s walking stick whilst Lucentio and Bianca peeped through the curtains hung under the balcony.
The brilliant final scene was just as invigoratingly crazy. The characters sat at a conveniently long gingham-clothed table, so that they could quick-change from Kate to Lucentio or Petruchio to Bianca, or move around the stage to enable Biondello to come on again as Grumio and then as the Widow. After the bets were laid Kate stood, hatless and unwigged, on the table to intone ‘her’ final speech; and everyone understood that the talented cast had ‘won the wager’ (5.2) of a cross-dressed, crossover production that culminated in an aptly titled closing ditty – ‘Nothing But Love’ – sung in Gilbert and Sullivan, Barber Quartet, Blues, Soul and lastly hip-swinging Elvis style. Further proof, if any were needed, of the general enjoyment, was the concluding round of applause for the weather.