It was a production of The Taming of the Shrew. It was in a major city, produced by a major acting company. And it was bad. But why? Or, rather, how?
It wasn't the
amateurish level of the players, for which one makes allowances at a
student production. (I can't truly call the actors "amateurs," since the
tickets cost money that somebody got. They were, however, students.) It
wasn't the standard substitution of contemporary music and dance moves
for real or faux Elizabethan ones. That's usually fun. I can't even
blame the actors, though most of them didn't understand half of what
they were saying. Clearly they were held hostage to the director's
"concept": her inexplicable conviction that twenty-first-century
audiences would go mad if invited to experience the comedy Shakespeare
actually wrote.
You may wonder why I'm not naming this director,
the company in question, or even the location of the performance, let
alone the names of the actors. I'm refraining from doing so in order to
protect those young hostages. I don't think any of it was their fault. I
will say only that this production was put on by pupils of the
"training academy" of a major Shakespeare company in a major American
city. More should have been expected of them. More should have been
given them.
There are of course the mundane objections
(which I'd let slip if the whole production hadn't been so fundamentally
wrong). Young actors, particularly American ones, seem generally to be
told not to swallow their consonants, especially those at the ends of
words. An understandable admonition, perhaps, but since it leads to an
unnatural sounding pronunciation which bestows undue emphasis on the
final sound, the result is a far cry from speech spoken "trippingly on
the tongue" (or, as these actors might have said, "trippingly on the
tonGGG"). A bit of care might also have been taken to guide the actors
in suiting the action to the word, as Hamlet also prescribes, since the
production featured numerous speeches which, though energetically
delivered, were completely nonsensical because said without some
intonation, facial expression, or physical action that might have
clarified their opaque Elizabethan meaning. So many lines were cut that I
cannot fathom why the director chose to retain the full speech of the
servant Biondello (here "Biondella," but I'll get to that in a minute)
describing the various afflictions suffered by lead actor Petruchio's servant's
horse. The animal is "rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives,
stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, swayed in the
back and shoulder-shotten, near-legged before" -- and that's less than a
sixth of it. The audience was tortured and bludgeoned with these and
like terms, spoken -- or bellowed -- without any accompanying gestures
to illustrate their import. (The audience knew they were supposed to
laugh, so, good-naturedly, they did, but I, spoiled by too many skillful
Shakespeare performances, am just the kind of ungenerous playgoer
Shakespeare hated, so I just sat there gaping in annoyed disbelief.)
This -- saying lines whose meanings, because they were mysterious to the actor, could not
be made clear to the audience -- was the pattern throughout the play.
Another small example: when the witty servant Grumio observes the old
pantaloon Gremio coming to woo young Bianca, he says sarcastically, or is supposed to say, in
an aside to the audience, "A proper stripling, and an amorous." Sarcastically, mind you! Amorous old Gremio is far from a "stripling," though he's
foolishly acting like one. There's no reason for Grumio (sorry, Grumia)
to yell out this line joyfully for all on stage to hear, as though it were a
straightforward and truthful description of the shaky old man now
entering the stage. (I don't like the ageism, either, but that's not the
performance issue at hand.) These players -- billed as incipient
professionals in a major company -- really might have been better
schooled in 1.) what their lines meant and 2.) why their characters were
saying them.
Alright. That's curmudgeonly enough. These are
garden-variety flaws for students learning to perform Shakespeare. The
heart of the objection here is what was done to a play which has
attained a curious status: because it concerns a man "taming" a woman, many twenty-first-century directors can't
stand it, yet they feel compelled to stage it. Maybe to punish it. And because they fail to
recognize that the comedy, in its original form without radical
alterations, contains the critique of "wife-taming" they are seeking,
some of them butcher it beyond recognition without substituting any
compensatory coherence. I've seen this done before, but, as I say above,
I have never witnessed a bigger on-stage mess than this one. At least,
not under the heading of The Taming of the Shrew.
First of all: you can't critique patriarchy unless you include a patriarchy. But the patriarchy disappears when most of the major characters have their gender changed to female. Baptista, father of
two marriageable girls, here became Baptista, mother of two
marriageable girls. Lucentio, who falls in love with one of the
daughters, becomes Lucentia, who falls in love with one of the daughters.
Bianca returns Lucentia's love, which is interesting, but creates new
problems in coherence. The mother, who strictly controls access to her
daughters, adheres to an archaic system of social rules by which the
girls must be continually supervised, and are destined for marriage and
childbearing rather than any sort of work or social independence -- the
condition of father Baptista's household in the original play -- and
one would think that, given these traditions, she or her like-minded
neighbors might evidence some dismay at discovering, in the end, that
the daughter has eloped with a woman. But no! Gay marriage
is apparently legal in the town of Padua, despite its otherwise
hidebound customs, and lesbian couplings cause no one to blink an eye.
With no authoritative husband, does this mean marriage relationships are
equal? Again, no! In the last scene, Lucentia mysteriously assumes the
right to order Bianca to obey her in some petty command, and Bianca's
refusal is treated by other characters as a woeful upending of the
marital hierarchy. All this makes sense if Bianca's married to a man. In
this production, I don't know what it was supposed to mean.
What
about sister Kate? Well. Petruchio's maleness was retained (although the
character was made to have inherited an estate from his mother rather
than his father, in this Amazonian Italy). But -- absent the patriarchy
-- nothing in the play could explain how or why he assumed the right to
"tame" his bride. Nor did he succeed in the slightest (contrary to the
original comedy's plot), because Kate simply went along with all his
directives, turning the commands into shared projects. She didn't want
to leave her wedding reception, but Petruchio did not cart her off,
quoting Old Testament laws which classify the wife as chattel. Instead,
Kate and Petruchio shared the speech, claiming each other as property,
then joined hands and left together. As for their struggles in
Petruchio's household, wherein Petruchio withholds food from his wife
until she begins to behave politely, no, again. Here the servants ganged
up on them both, starving them into some kind of submission, the nature
of which was unclear. It was Kate and Petruchio versus his household
staff, another bonding exercise for the pair. The play's final scene was
gibberish. Instead of launching into her famous and spirited defense of
wifely submission -- a speech that can be played with irony, or as a
move in a fascinating power-game whose rules only Kate and Petruchio are beginning to figure out -- Kate began by reciting some of Polonius'
lines from Hamlet. This oddity was followed, again, by a shared
version of a speech which was meant to belong to one of them alone, with
the two finally pledging obedience to each other. (How does that work?)
Okay. I'm not in favor of wife-taming. But I
do prefer that supposedly world-class Shakespeare enterprises honor the
plays they undertake to perform. To honor a play means, at the very
least, to understand it.
The Taming of the Shrew is a play
about social and domestic roles. It cleverly dramatizes the ways such
roles are forced upon unwilling players -- it begins with an induction
(cut by this company) in which a boy servant is compelled to pretend to
be an obedient wife -- and the fascinating ways social players may circumvent the restrictions imposed by their parts, finding power where they
can. Servants turn the tables on masters; wives turn the tables on
husbands. The ludic theme is strong. Domestic and civic life is in many
ways a game, and imagination comes into play as subjects learn how to
use clever language to win. The Taming of the Shrew does not need to be rewritten in order for this theme to be driven home.
Let this post be a plea to let the comedy make its own argument! At least, give audiences something to argue about! Don't let them leave thinking they just saw something Shakespearean, but having no idea what it was.
Although it goes against my nature, let
me close by saying something nice. The best actor in the production was the one who played the Traveling Pedant, a stranger coerced into pretending to
be Lucentio/a's mother (again, changed from father) so as (falsely) to
witness and approve Lucentia's and Bianca's marriage. This was a player
who not only knew the meaning of his lines, but who remembered he was on
stage even when he wasn't speaking. His subtle glee at being asked to
dress and act like a wealthy matron was hilariously evident as, subtly
practicing his role, he privately tried on voguish, exaggerated
"feminine" gestures and facial expressions which delighted both him and
the audience. In this case, the re-gendering paid off. It was a bright
spot in the chaos. I hope to see him in a future Shakespeare production
-- directed by someone else!
