The Taming of the Shrew
Is the casting of an all-female ensemble enough to insulate an audience against a particularly outrageous example of theatrical misogyny? The answer, it seems, is almost. Marion Potts’ interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew is raucously entertaining and visually engaging, but there are still a couple of sections that grate on the nerves.
Bell Shakespeare?
Playhouse, Sydney Opera House
Thursday, 22 October, 2009
Is the casting of an all-female ensemble enough to insulate an audience against a particularly outrageous example of theatrical misogyny? The answer, it seems, is almost. Marion Potts’ interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew is raucously entertaining and visually engaging, but there are still a couple of sections that grate on the nerves.
The Taming of the Shrew is a fairly typical Shakespearian comedy, involving impenetrable plotting and elaborate disguises on the part of lovesick youngsters. Baptista (Sandy Gore) is saddled with two daughters. Bianca (Emily Rose Brennan) is comely and beset by suitors. Her elder sister Katherina (Lotte St Clair) is of a less than sweet disposition and deemed to be unmarriageable. Baptista hits on a plan. He decrees that none shall wed Bianca until Kate is married off, then sits back and lets Bianca’s lovers worry about the Kate problem. These hapless suitors (Vanessa Downing and Beth Aubrey) are successful in getting the rogue Petruchio (Jeanette Cronin) interested in Kate’s ample dowry, but allow Lucentio (Luisa Hastings Edge) to slip under the radar and woo the fair Bianca.
Marion Potts attempts to neuter the spectacle of gender wars by casting only women, in the hope of exposing other power dynamics in the play. The success of this is varied, as it does feel slightly gimmicky. Yet by having a single-gender cast, you can see the characters as human beings treating each other badly, rather than men trashing women and vice versa. On the flipside, watching the women swagger about with exaggerated machismo highlights the absurdity of the attitudes of the male characters.
The cast is superb, but it’s Cronin who steals the show. Her Petruchio is alarmingly unstable, alternately jocular and abusive with an underlying menace. It’s a performance that makes Kate’s capitulation all the more believable, as a matter of survival. Unfortunately the dynamic between Kate and Petruchio is a little off – Cronin is slightly Dickensian, while St Clair has more of a Bogan air.
Judi Farr is sadly underused as Biondello and the Widow, while Gore dominates as a Brando-esque Baptista. Her character is completely suited to the setting of a shabby RSL function room that has seen better days. Anna Tregloan’s design, complete with drably psychedelic carpet, mirror balls and dodgy karaoke setup evoke a world in which outdated gender roles can flourish. Shifts in costuming and sometimes the gender of some of the minor characters all add to this sense of a bizarre, bygone world.
For all the cleverness in casting and setting, there are aspects of Taming of the Shrew that are pretty unpalatable. A husband starving his newly wed bride until she succumbs to Stockholm syndrome is difficult to stomach, as is the bride’s big speech at the end about the beauty of wifely submission. Happily at the end, Potts finds a way though Bianca to express modern reactions to such attitudes.
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