Shrew: A Banging On About the Final Scene, If Not A Final Banging On About

Swedish Chef voice: "Three Deee! Three Deee!"* 
(I think the horrifying clown on the left 
 refusing to wear a mask is Bob Fosse.)

 Sorry that this "Saturday's blog" is arriving so late on a Sunday...
 When I decided to move from Defoe to Shakespeare, I hadn't considered how big a part silly voices would play in the new undertaking. I just thought it might be fun if one of the outlaws in Two Gentlemen sounded a bit like Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy, and then realised that if he was American, maybe all the outlaws should be American, and then that if everyone in Milan was American I'd have considerably more voices to play with, and viewers might actually be able to tell what was going on, right down to the who's whose, and that whether or not I could actually do any of these voices wasn't the issue as long as I held my nerve and stuck with whatever sound was coming out. Choosing a voice was like choosing a mask: it didn't provide just the illusion of range, it gave a usefully immediate idea of how a character might behave, allowing me to act genuinely differently without having to do anything as creepy as actually putting on a mask. Like wearing a mask however, it also presented the risk that a departure from naturalism would mean a loss of detail... not that a performace couldn't be big - poetry is big - but it shouldn't be unwieldy. Or it should be unwieldy - wielding something unwieldy is part of the fun of it - but you had to still be the person saying the words, you had to, continuing the sword/mace/hammer metaphor, keep a hold on it, not just let go and pretend you're still wielding it. And there were other benefits to using voices whether or not I could actually do them: "regional accents" no longer needed to be the reserve of the non-posh for example, and in a play so concerned with who has the most stuff, associating status with a character's accent seemed an unnecessary distraction. Added to which I find it hard to play convincingly big in my own polite, second-gen Received Pronunciation voice, and I knew I wanted to go into this reading playing it big.

Home continent poster.

 Basically I knew that I wanted to honour the trashiness of this play. I don't just mean how well it's traditionally catered to a kind of Renaissance Festival fetishism (perfectly legitimately - Shakespeare includes a scene in which a woman binds her sister's wrists and beats her so kinkiness is a signature feature, although crucially there's no spanking as there would be in "Kiss Me Kate" - the violence meted out on Katherine is restricted to restraint, sleep deprivation and enforced vegetarianism). I would still be reading in my pyjamas, and you'd never see my legs, this would be a hard to honour. What I mean is that, coming to the play knowing it quite well, and not really liking it (and certainly not having any idea how I'd eventually play Katherine's final speech), I at least knew I couldn't do what I'd seen the weekend before in Jonathan Miller's BBC version which, despite the casting of John Cleese - or maybe Cleese was instrumental in this - makes every effort to spare its audience's blushes by presenting as joyless, uncomfortable and low energy a Petruccio as possible (maybe in an attempt to "let the play breathe", but with the same result normally attending such exercises in "trusting to the text", namely a long, boring thing doesn't make sense. I knew that if I was going to work out how to like the play, or at least present something likeable, morality would have to go out of the window, and I'd have to present a play of forces. You didn't have to like these people, you just had to enjoy them. And I thought about Kusturica, and how much I'd always enjoyed these dangerous arseholes:

 Because Petruccio is Shakespeare's first glamourisation of the human glitch, the bug that risks sending the system crashing, like Aaron later, or Iago or even Hamlet. He's gonzo, in the Fear and Loathing sense, not the muppet sense, and while making him Australian was a very last minute decision (inspired by how much Germaine Greer weirdly sings his praises in The Female Eunuch) I'm very glad I did because giving him an accent other than mine definitely helped, although it did make his back and forth with the West Country Katherine incredibly fiddly. "Englishness", by which I mean my middle-class-narrator strain of it, carries with it such a sense of existing comfortably within a system, and yet the possibility of comfortably existing within the system is meant to be what's being questioned.

And the European version. 

 So, yeah, the problem - the problem I didn't know how I was going to address on Monday - was not Petruccio but Katherine. Because it's one thing to denounce the grubbiness of the marriage contract by having a possibly sociopathic anti-hero boldly state announce that his wife is chattel, but it's quite another to have his headstrong wife publicly agreeing. Katherine isn't just headstrong though, in her treatment of Bianca she is legitimately a total fucking nightmare (and attempting to make the play more "feminist" by portraying Bianca as a duplicitous b-word deserving of such treatment, simply because she's the only woman managing to single-handedly steer a course through everyone's bullshit seems... well it doesn't seem very feminist) and so I was fine setting up Petruccio against Katherine in a kind of Alien Versus Predator way, and I wasn't worried about portraying both participants as horrible, because they were discomforting inhabitants of an order that was also horrible. What I was worried about was presenting a woman falling in love with the man who "breaks" her as a happy ending. So... I played it as well as I could... day by day, act by act... and by the end of Act Four there was still no sign of Katherine being broken. She submits, but Hortensio's presence here is crucial, because it means she has a witness to Petruccio's misidentifying of the sun, so she's not gaslit, she's just going along with a stupid game because she has no choice, which is definitely progress. Miller's Shrew showed Kate suddenly having the time of her life with this submission, laughing uncontrollably when pretending Vincentio was a woman, but showing Kate actively enjoy this submission didn't seem necessary or, more crucially, remotely believable. It's just no big deal. By Act Five then, I found Katherine still playable. And she didn't have to be in love when to kiss Petruccio in the street, all I had to play was that she goes along with it. But still. A kiss isa pretty big story beat. Maybe then, it just didn't have to be that big for Katherine, which is how I found myself tolerating what followed. If the kiss floored Petruccio, I thought, some power could be restored to Katherine, and given the play wasn't going to end with the downfall of the patriarchy, maybe great sex could provide a happy ending instead. It didn't seem likely, but thinking along those lines as I continued to read the act, Petruccio certainly seemed goofier now, not remotely furious, and with the rest of the table turning on Katherine, and with Katherine having learnt that pretending wouldn't kill her, her sudden reinvention as the perfect wife seemed perfectly playable again. BUT still not a great ending. UNTIL, reading Katherine's massive speech in the light of a newly soppy Petruccio, I suddenly saw "will" and "kneel" and "smooth" and "parts" and "come", and an exercise in aggressive seduction playfully masquerading as submission, and I saw Katherine playing with her power over Petruccio, and maybe all the men seated there, and then I saw Petruccio's "Come, Katherine, let's to bed" and thought, yeah, that'll do, that's what couples getting married at the end of Shakespearean comedies really means, it's never a story of "happily ever after", it's a story of two people working out the happiest way to end up in bed together. And that's hard to convey when you're a middle-aged man in pyjamas reading from a big book (and I really wish I'd held that eyeline for all of "soft and weak, smooth") but anyway, that is what I think happens at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. Just don't worry about the morning after. You can see me perform the whole play here, let me know if you've any questions.

* reference clarifier: