The Taming of the Shrew: spoof, comedic love story, post-feminist broadside or some combination of all three.?
Photo: Andrew Alexander
Why do Shakespeare straight if you can spoof it? That’s the approach director Eleanor Crowder has taken with her all-male production of this early Shakespeare comedy. Problem is, while the show is often entertaining, it ultimately can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a spoof, a comedic love story, a post-feminist broadside or some combination of all three.
Scott Florence, well-versed in playing fast and loose with Shakespeare thanks to his years of experience with the irreverent A Company of Fools, sets the performance bar high as Petruchio, the wily, self-assured gentleman from Verona who tames (or does he?) and marries the snarly, fiercely independent Kate. Sardonic, self-interested, a natural student of behavioural psychology, this Petruchio plays those whom he meets like yoyos. Florence is a delight to watch, especially when he channels Pommes Frites, the preening character he created for Fools shows like Shakespeare’s Danish Play.
Nicholas Amott is Kate, the daughter of a Padua lord named Baptista (Brie Barker). Amott – a young, stocky and hirsute performer – plays up the comic possibilities of man-in-woman’s-clothing as he shifts from a loutish, drunken Kate to an obedient lady with a touch of the devil still in her eyes. Unfortunately, Amott doesn’t always enunciate clearly. More importantly, under Crowder’s direction he seems uncertain about why he’s doing what he’s doing: is this Kate striking a subversive blow for womankind by merely appearing to subject herself to Petruchio? truly buckling under to him despite that devil still in her eyes? just being an opportunist and taking love where she can find it?
At times there seems to be a nudge-nudge, wink-wink understanding with Petruchio that the whole subjugation thing is just a show. At other times, it seems not to be a show at all but genuine.
Also on stage but without the direction he needs: Chris Bedford as both Bianca, Kate’s younger, simpering sister, and Grumio, Petruchio’s servant and the play’s fool. Bearded and long-haired, Bedford is amusing as the sashaying, eyelash-batting Bianca pursued by a coterie of suitors, but his Grumio lacks definition, a problem stronger physicality would solved.
Other cast members include Guy Buller playing a convincingly ineffectual Hortensio, one of Kate’s suitors, and a pinch-mouthed Pedant.
There are several very funny additions to the original script, some of them designed to heighten the performer-audience connection. There’s also lots of choral singing courtesy of music director Rachel Eugster; lustily male, it captures the vigour that Crowder doesn’t always nurture elsewhere in the production.
There are also confusing moments. Baptista, for example, writes with a quill without first dipping it in ink: is that part of the spoof, or simple directorial negligence? Ditto the yardstick brandished by Petruchio near the end of this period production: it looks like it was recently bought at Home Depot, but is that deliberate or mere sloppiness? If deliberate, there should be more contemporary references in the production to complement it.
Like the other shortfalls in the show, these underscore Crowder’s lack of a firm directorial stance.
The Taming of the Shrew
By William Shakespeare
A Bear & Co. Production
At The Gladstone, April 19-May 5