Show Archive
The Taming of the Shrew
production background information
We were interested to know a bit more about how the production itself was going, and the director, Marco Ghelardi, kindly took some time-out from rehearsal to give some answers. We also had a chat with the designer, Mauro Tinti, and have a preview of the set design, hot off his drawing board here.
Why is the play set in the Renaissance period?'The Taming of the Shrew is truly a play that belongs to a different age. The reason the values of the characters in the play strike us is because they are irremediably at conflict with our own values and with what we perceive to be right. The way Petruchio behaves with Katherine is typically Renaissance: she does not conform with the rules of society as he knows it and he sees her almost as not human, so he tries to make her conform and 'humanise' her. There is never any question as to whether such rules are right or wrong, and the process of 'humanisation' is a violent, ruthless one; the object (Katherine) is forced to lose everything in order to gain a new identity. This is exactly how Europeans were behaving towards native people in America at the time.
To make sense of the story I feel it is necessary to put some distance between the Renaissance characters and ourselves, a modern audience. Usually the first thing a director uses to indicate when a play is set is costume, but in addition to this I have also researched how daily life was different to express as truthfully as possible the different world inhabited by the characters.
The play is a farce, and there are a lot of jokes and funny inventions written into it. However, many of these do not make sense to modern audiences, and the evident anachronism is a trap I have worked hard to avoid. '
If the play is so out-dated, particularly after the rise of feminism, what is the point of doing it today?'There is certainly a risk that the production could loose relevance and not been able to speak to a contemporary audience. However, there are two main reasons to perform the play. Firstly, it is always important to present on the stage cultures that are different from our own, not only in space but also in time. Even if we reject or condemn them, they force us to ask us questions that otherwise would not have been raised. Secondly, and somewhat paradoxically, the more we emphasise that our story is set in the past the more things that have stayed the same (the importance of money, for example) stand out. This helps us to question, how much, really and deep down, we are different.
While it is true that society, and especially the condition of women, has changed since the there are again a few things that need to be remembered. In fact, the play was shocking for Elizabethans as well as for us; Fletcher (one of Shakespeare's contemporaries) found it so outrageous that he even wrote in answer to it a play entitled Tamer Tam'd, which is much more acceptable by today's standards. The Taming was never intended to be a set of instructions to teach husbands how to behave with their wives; this is why it is a play-within-a-play set in a sort of mock-Italy.
Moreover, the Taming is not just about the role of the woman. It is about the role of the individual in society: how much are we free? How much can we change of society? Who are the real conformists? We might find the point of view exposed in Katherine's final speech completely outdated, but certainly not the debate on individual and society. '
How does the production deal with the issue of “the-play-within-the-play”?'The Induction begins with a reversal: the Beggar becomes a Lord and all his desires are satisfied. The play itself is about this - about turning the world upside down, but this topsy-turvy world is no easy carnival. People here are greedy, manipulative, aggressive and violent. It is all just a dream and not a pleasant one. If the play-within-a-play is emphasised in the overall production making it highly theatrical and even surreal, then the point is made at the beginning and there is no reason to keep reminding the audience.
At the beginning of the rehearsal process, we were tempted to keep the Beggar on throughout the play or have him coming back at the end. There are also records of a play called "The Taming of a Shrew" in which the Beggar remains on stage, keeps interrupting and provides a sort of moral at the end. The relationship between Shakespeare's text and this one is an object of debate: I believe - but of course there is no evidence of this, just a theatre person's intuition - I believe that "A Shrew" refers to an early version of the play, that Shakespeare then changed because of practical constraints (possibly the need for a smaller cast for touring) and then realised that actually the play works much better in this second version. '
What is the relationship between the two plots that compose the main play?'It is very interesting that many academic interpretations and theatrical adaptations of the play have given little or no attention to the Bianca plot, instead focusing only on the Taming plot. This can be a valid and challenging interpretation, but Shakespeare's play is composed of two strands and not just one. Each plot acts as a counterpoint to the other, demonstrating that there is more than one approach to the issue.
We have looked at the two plots in terms of the women that are at the centre of them. Both have strong personalities, both are, so to speak, born in the wrong time, when society had certain expectations of how women should properly behave. As we were saying earlier, the play is about the freedom of the individual in society. Because Katherine and Bianca are women they are very much bound to a series of expectations, despite their own individual personalities, yet each of them finds her own personal solution to deal with this problem. The play takes a very unsentimental view, telling us we cannot change things in one easy step, but we have to adopt much more subtle strategies. The great craft of Shakespeare is that the strategies of the two women at the end of the play are the opposite of what we would have expected from them at the beginning: Katherine gives up the evident oppositional struggle (although we might believe she carries on in another way), while once married Bianca gives up the mask of obedience she has worn until then (and we are led believe that she is not going to wear it any more). '
Do Kate and Petruchio fall in love?'There is no evidence from the text that they do: they never tell us, nor they tell each other. They do kiss, true, but whether that amounts to falling in love is open to debate. In our production they need to struggle first to find some sort of balanced truce in their relationship, and it is only after this that love might blossom.
Again, it is interesting to see this in opposition to the Bianca plot: Lucentio falls in love at first sight, but by the end of the play his passion seems to have cooled. Their story is about a relationship as a product of a burst of passion. In Petruchio and Kate's story, on the other hand, the relationship happens first and the feeling comes afterwards as a consequence of it. '
Is Katherine tamed at the end?'By the end Katherine has learnt how to survive in a society of men: it is not so much that Kate is 'tamed', rather that she grows up out of the 'problem' she had in her relationship with Petruchio. The problem is no longer a problem, but rather now a possibility.
In the final speech Katherine explains her solution, and in our production we have tried to make clear that this is just her personal solution - she speaks in general terms as if to all womankind because often in life we think our own personal solutions have a universal value. In this context it is very important that Bianca's plot acts as a counterpoint, to show that other women in other situations choose a different way.
Let me point out though that this is what we have found works for us, for these specific actors playing the parts. In a different theatre, with different cast, the interpretation might be different. '