Taming the Shrew offers laughs and pause for thought

In the critical analysis of Shakespeare that emerged in the late Victorian era, it was decided that the canon included three ‘problem plays’: All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida.

These were so called because they are complex and ambiguous, and shift rapidly between comedy and a darker tone.

It’s a vague enough definition – and Shakespeare’s work so wide ranging – that other works have been included in that description over the years.

The Winter’s Tale, Timon of Athens, Merchant of Venice and even Hamlet have all found themselves with the ‘problem’ label added.

Rather more recently, author Professor Neil Rhodes has described the defining element of a problem play as possessing a controversial plot.

On this basis, even if The Taming of the Shrew (1590-1592) is not classed as a problem play, then it’s a play with a big problem.

Here we have the tale of Petruchio, who marries and then ‘tames’ the shrewish Katherine – i there an equivalent male adjective for ‘shrewish’? To do so, he employs psychological torture (denial of sleep and food) as he ‘educates’ his new wife to understand that, if he says the sun is in fact the moon – or visa versa – then it is.

Subservience is the order of the day and makes, we are told, for a peaceful, loving marriage.

As such attitudes have been seen as increasingly unacceptable, directors have sought to find ways of dealing with it in more modern terms.

For instance, in 1978, in Peter Bogdanov’s iconic modern-dress production at Stratford – the first time I had seen the RSC – Jonathan Pryce and Paola Dionisotti played the leads, (with David Suchet as Gremio). Here, Dionisotti made Kate’s final speech one of defeat, not of a victorious sense of having delight at having been ‘tamed’.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production by Justin Audibert is not the first to flip the genders in the piece, but it is particularly successful.

By presenting Italy as a matriarchal society, the comments and actions about and against those who do not hold power become more obviously jarring: in which case, how have societies regarded them (and still do, to varying degrees) as acceptable when said and done by men against women?

It also helps to bring out the centrality of money to the society represented – not least in terms of its links with marriage through dowries and land, with women having an intrinsic link to property.

And when, in the play’s closing monologue, our gender-flipped, male Kate tells us: “I am ashamed that men are so simple, To offer war where they should kneel for peace …” we have the play concluding with a comment on toxic masculinity that gives it all an added edge, and has the audience laughing sharply as Kate faces them from the front of the stage.

However, Taming of the Shrew was neither a po-faced nor puritanical play – it’s a bawdy comedy with plenty of references to sex that the first audiences would have found hilarious.

Rather, this is Carry On Taming the Shrew for the #MeToo era.

The company’s Merry Wives of Windsor that I saw at the end of 2018 had me laughing out loud more than at any previous production of anything by the Bard and, while this doesn’t manage quite that level of hilarity, there are are no shortage of laughs from an exceptionally strong cast – all of which also helps to avoid any whines about it being ‘PC’.

My pick of a terrific ensemble has to be Sophie Stanton as Gremia – one of three scheming suitors for Kate’s younger brother, Bianco, who cannot be married until his sibling has been paired off. Somehow she manages to glide around the stage, her Elizabethan skirts presumably hiding wheels, with the audience constantly laughing at the movement. Together with her struggles with words, swords and more, it’s a glorious comic performance.

Joseph Arkley is very good as Kate, while Claire Price has a ball as Petruchia. Hortensia, another suitor for the hand of Bianco, is served excellently by Amelia Donkor and Amy Trigg makes a wonderful Biondella, servant to Lucentia.

Oh, and what a delightful nod to Broadway to have Petruchia absently sing a line from Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate at one point – an acknowledgement that, for all its problems, The Taming of the Shrew remains a very popular entertainment. All of which serves to remind us, were it needed, that Shakespeare remains the Bard for all seasons and all times.

• The Taming of the Shrew is in repertoire at London’s Barbican with As You Like It and Measure for Measure until 18 January – www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/series/royal-shakespeare-company-2019-20-season. After that, it will visit Canterbury, Plymouth, Nottingham, Newcastle and Blackpool – www.rsc.org.uk/the-taming-of-the-shrew/on-tour, before heading to the US, South Korea and Japan –www.rsc.org.uk/the-taming-of-the-shrew/international-tour/.

Musical tales from the mists of time

Mists. Of time or otherwise.

Way back in the mists of time – or the beginning of the 1980s, as it is sometimes known – I entertained ideas of a very specific career.

I wanted to be a singer.

My music teachers considered it far from impossible: Noel McKee – probably the best teacher I ever had in any subject, throughout my entire schooling – believed that I had a very “Russian middle register”.

Other teachers and tutors later said that, while I didn’t have perfect pitch, I had perfect tone. Which doesn’t sound bad, really, even viewed through the prism of several intervening decades.

I was a mezzo – which often seemed to me to be something of a neither-here-nor-there sort of voice, but wasn’t.

Unfortunately, despite the extraordinary help and support of Noel over my three years at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School, I couldn’t quite make up the lost ground on theory that had occurred at Fairfield, where my O’ level music lessons had been a dreadful experience – characterised in my memory by a bullying approach from the teacher, that I excluded myself from on mornings by walking (slowly) to school with a claim of bus problems.

It was an approach that, no matter how bad I was at some other subjects, I never extended to any other lesson or course.

Now for clarity, I could never have sung Wagner – or Verdi or Puccini or any other grand opera, for that matter. There was no way that I had that level of voice.

But light opera, operetta, oratorio and lieder were well within my vocal capabilities.

I would love to have sung Gilbert and Sullivan with the D’Oyly Carte.

But hey ho – it wasn’t to be.

It’s not snide to say that parental support was not all it could have been.

My father had paid one of his church organists to teach me some basic piano many years earlier, but it was dire.

Dull lessons that inspired nobody. Indeed, I don’t recall, at that point, being particularly enthused about learning. I suspect the decision that I should be taught was a combination of our having a piano in the house – thanks to my mother’s parents – and some cock-eyed idea of respectably-educated young gals, combined with one of an even more respectable young woman who could play the organ in church.

That I later pretty much taught myself is at least a suggestion that, with a good teacher, I might have prospered more, earlier.

That I taught myself via a piano score of Oliver! is even more of an indication that the parental choice of music was hardly inspirational.

But that was a theme that was to be repeated over and again.

By the second half of the 1970s, I was regularly competing in an annual local festival in Ashton-under-Lyne, in a variety of categories – including singing.

My parents exercised a certain amount of control over what I sang. Hymns were expected – or old songs like Cherry Ripe, which came out of a brown leather-clad tome that almost seemed to take on the status of family heirloom. I think I still have it somewhere.

I combined a lack of inspiration with nerves. Not good.

Later, in Lancaster, I carried on this trend – albeit tempered by Noel accompanying me for rather better pieces (a bit of Mozart, some Rachmaninov, Schubert …).

But looking back, I realise that I had the most extraordinarily limited knowledge of what was possible.

Nor were my parents particularly encouraging in other ways.

When I sang the mezzo/alto solo in an all-female arrangement of Fauré’s magnificent requiem in a big concert at school, they didn’t attend. I remember my mother sniffily noting that it was Catholic music.

It was actually staged at St Martin’s College – beyond, even, the school hall.

Oh goodness, there were nerves. I remember standing there, score in hand, with Noel before me as conductor, coaxing me, encouraging me – because he believed in me and knew I could do it.

But my parents couldn’t put their own beliefs aside to attend such an occasion.

The school was not Catholic. Noel was an Anglican.

But my parents could not set aside their own beliefs aside to support their own daughter.

These days I have no belief left in any god that has been described by any human civilisation.

But it doesn’t mean that I cannot still take great joy in music that was written for religious purposes. Only yesterday, I listened to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis for the first time – wow: simply wow.

Yet my parents could not set aside their most sectarian and puritanical instincts in order to support their own offspring.

Mind, they didn’t attend when I was a soloist when we performed Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols a year or so later either, and Britten was, like us, a Prod.

There are times when I wonder just what they were on.

And do you think I can talk to them about it?

No.

What good would it do? What would be the point?

In so many ways, it would seem so petty; so small-minded and so – arguably – disrespectful of clearly seriously-held beliefs.

Not that I didn’t keep trying, on the singing level, for many years.

Some years later, after I moved south to find work and spent some 18 months living with my parents in Reading and commuting to London every day, we hit a similar situation.

My father was, as that time, minister to a congregation that met at an old – well, ancient really – church in Henley on Thames, shared with the local Anglicans.

A concert was planned, with the Reading Male Voice Choir. They needed a soloist for a couple of interludes. My father volunteered me.

I was still trying to get into the business, and spending money on singing classes with a serious tutor. And I was just starting to understand that there was a whole range of female vocal styles out there that I had hardly even heard of – I’d just, for instance, ‘discovered’, Barbra Streisand.

So, four songs across two interludes.

My parents made it quite clear that they expected hymns or religious songs.

I went down the musicals route. I rehearsed with the conductor/pianist, who was wonderful (and himself, a clergy son).

In the end, the first three songs went – if not badly, then not inspirationally.

But something happened on the fourth. I’d just recently discovered Cole Porter’s Everytime We Say Goodbye (thanks to Mick Hucknell) and amazingly, it came off completely.

It was sung with eyes shut – not as a deliberate choice, but because that was what happened – and I could feel the mood in that ancient building change. For once, I got them and I held them.

I’ve done it again since, a few times – impromptu performances, usually in pubs: Porter again or Gershwin. Getting lost in the music and finding that the audience, in spite of any booze, goes completely quiet and listens.

Like so many other people, my life could have taken all sorts of different directions.

I don’t dislike – never mind hate – where I am now. But I do sometimes wonder about what might have been …

Why has all this come back again right now?

Well, partly because I have had that opportunity – which I’ve explained more than once recently – to listen to music more than usual.

I find myself having a remarkable amount of understanding – but not nearly as much as if I’d carried on with my music studies.

And perhaps rather unusually for me, I find myself regretting that I stopped learning about music for so long. Because going back to it now, with some intensity, reminds me of just how much it means to me.