“As old as Sibyl and as curst…” the 1980 BBC Taming of the Shrew.

September 15, 2018

cleese

Yes, this is the one with John Cleese in it. He is taller than the rest of the cast and uses his height to great advantage. Many of Cleese’s mannerisms are entirely appropriate for the character of Petruchio but they are nonetheless entirely familiar. He cuffs his servant Grumio about with relaxed confidence – almost as though he’s had extensive dramatic extreme cuffing underlings.

Now if I’d been director Jonathan Miller, or rather, some notional omnipotent Jonathan Miller – with absolute power to cast whoever I wanted, I could not have resisted the temptation to also cast Andrew Sachs as Grumio. I would have been and gone and done that. Actually, I probably would have tried to cast Prunella Scales as Katherine and Connie Booth as Bianca. And before they had dragged me screaming from the premises of the BBC, I would have argued for a bold new staging of the play in 1970s Torquay.

But that’s just me. Jonathan Miller has infinitely more artistic integrity than I.

The dominance of Cleese in this production is further emphasised by the fact that Tranio (Anthony Pedley, who also plays a fine Roderigo in the BBC Othello), when pretending to be posh Lucentio, affects the voice of “Praline” – the character Cleese plays in both the Dead Parrot and the Eric the Half a Bee sketches.

So Cleese is very dominant here, to the extent that Sarah Badell’s Katherine seems a victim preordained – tamed before she even appears. Petruchio is “acting” throughout the story, and you never think Kate’s shouting is going to put him off his stride for a moment.

As with all of these BBC Shakespeare productions, there’s the repeated pleasure of seeing familiar faces in unfamiliar roles. Angus Lennie, best known as Steve McQueen’s best pal in The Great Escape – the one who goes “wire happy” and gets machine gunned half way through the film – has a small part. John Barron, most famous as Reggie Perrin’s boss, is Vincentio. Jonathan Cecil is delightfully vacuous as Hortensio and Joan Hickson (who rivals Margaret Rutherford as a contender for the title of definitive Miss Marple) is Hortensio’s rich widow of a bride.

The staging is conventional enough. The street scenes are very Andrea Palladio and the interiors are very Vermeer.

The issue with this production is its attempt at seriousness. Perhaps all clowns want to play Hamlet, and if they can’t they can play Petruchio. John Cleese in 1980 was at the height of his powers as a comic and most of these powers are on display in the form of trademark sudden movements, leaps, double takes, and sudden shifts of register and volume. However, when he’s entirely alone, a very very serious Petruchio emerges, one with a very very serious purposes.

Because Cleese and Miller, who obviously knew each other very well, both agreed to try to take a supposedly altruistic view of the “taming” regime, stressing the fundamentally unhappy life of the Katherine of Act I. From a modern point of view, Petruchio’s Orwellian insistence that Katherine accept his sole whimsical authority as to whether the sun is the moon or vice versa evokes an image of Donald Trump telling his fans not to believe the evidence of their own senses. A Trump era production would have a kind of moral and political obligation to reference this association.

In any case, using starvation and sleep-deprivation as “therapeutic techniques” cannot help but make us think of gulags and suicide cults. They ought to have made people think of those very things in 1980. When Sarah Badell delivers her famous Act V speech in favour of female subjugation, you see the glazed look of a true believer in her shiny eyes. Where is the Kate that once there lived? Where is she now? Perfectly dead? Who wouldn’t rather be wed instead to Susan Penhaligan’s Bianca who though never as loud as the Kate of Acts I and II, has retained some spirit of resistance. Indeed Penhaligan’s Bianca was never as demure as her father liked to think her.

There are different things you can do with this profoundly horrible speech in a modern production. Kate can speak it ludicrously so that everybody knows it’s not for real. You can have Kate speak it with a wink and a smile, implicating her as a full partner in a plot to fleece Lucentio and Hortensio. Or, you can play up the subjugation to the point where patriarchy is more brutally exposed and the explicit “moral” of the tale is completely subverted. But Miller’s production does none of these things and ends up looking like a rather desperate justification.

Jonathan Miller cuts the induction to the play, the Christopher Sly play within a play framing. The induction dilutes any “reality effect” by emphasising frames within frames. The induction suits Taming of the Shrew insofar as Petruchio, Tranio, Lucentio, Hortensio etc. are all play acting themselves. Roles within roles. Nothing anyone says is to be taken at face value.

In the same way that I will happily confess to enjoying Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady more than Shaw’s Pygmalion, I believe I probably enjoy Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate more than Taming of the Shrew. Cole Porter, of course, does retain a play within a play framing device, and in this strange but crucial respect is a more faithful interpreter of Shakespeare than Jonathan Miller.

I have some thoughts about some other BBC Shakespeare productions in this series…

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