Theatre
The Taming of the Shrew (Haymarket) The Entertainer (Shaftesbury)
Moments from history
Christopher Edwards
This is a production that takes you back in time to the way Shakespeare was per- formed some 25 years ago; with a prosce- nium arch, conventional props and sans governing 'concept'. Indeed, it is the very opposite of 'director's theatre'. You come to see stars playing leading roles and it must be said that both Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Dalton are well worth watch- ing. The play, however, is left to speak for itself and what have been called 'all the awkward sexual and political questions' are left unaddressed. The shrew, Kate, has her peevish spirit broken by her husband and, at the end, delivers the famous submission speech in recognition of the prevailing social hierarchy: 'Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign . . . . / Such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband. . . .' Just as she moves to abase herself at Petruchio's feet he catches up her hands and kisses her. Here, under Toby Robertson's direction this key moment expresses a sense of realised domestic freedom.
Kate's family stand amazed at the char- acter's transformation and so too have several critics. No irony? No lever for the modern feminist point of view? Vanessa Redgrave, of all actresses, playing this part in this way? (We still await some satiric reinterpretation of Grumio's line from the play about 'an old trot with ne'er a tooth in her head'). The production could in fact be defended as feminist. Here, you might say, we see Kate as utterly accepting of the dominant civil order and to witness her so completely in that world is a more radical statement, precisely because there is no ironical counterpoint. But that would be too nice an interpretation and in any case there seems to be no serious complaint about the evening's comparative inno- cence. True, we might miss some of the excitement often provided by the RSC but the warmth of the laughter in the Haymar- ket suggests that orthodox commercial Shakespeare has a ready public. And what a relief to be out of the Barbican's totalita- rian concrete bunker.
Vanessa Redgrave's Kate is broadly played and very funny. Her early, untamed Kate is a coltish, gawky schoolgirl of pouts, grimaces and stamping feet. In her outfit of velvet culottes and bobbing blonde curls it is as if the spirit of St Trinians had got inside Little Lord Fauntleroy. But the play really belorigs to Timothy Dalton's excel- lent Petruchio. There is not a trace of the demented sadist we have encountered in recent years. Instead here is Hazlitt's idea of the part. Dalton acts the assumed character of the mad-cap railer with com- plete presence of mind, with conscious theatricality and without a particle of ill humour. It is an engaging and sympathetic performance and if the pleasure of the production becomes rather more muted in the second half this is largely the fault of the play.
The Taming of the Shrew now plays in repertoire with Antony and Cleopatra.
Almost 30 years ago Laurence Olivier invited John Osborne to write a play for him. The playwright, fresh from the suc- cess of Look Back in Anger, produced The Entertainer. Those of us too young to have seen it take on trust the excitement of a performance often described as one of Olivier's greatest triumphs. Still, it is worth recording the recollections of older friends who remember The Entertainer playing to half-empty houses at the Bristol Old Vic.
In certain respects this is a suitable history when you consider Olivier's charac- ter Archie Rice — a washed-up, middle- aged song-and-dance man reduced to playing in a nude revue to tiny audiences at seaside resorts. Olivier gave Archie's bitter hilarity a sort of tragic stature and in 1957 the decline of the music-hall tradition was identifiable as symbolic of a more general national decline.
Thirty years later Peter Bowles has a harder task trying to invest Archie's condi- tion (`dead behind the eyes') with much more than a local, familial despair. His performance struck me as excellent, har- rowing at times and powerfully sardonic. Despite Osborne's occasional sentimental- ity and uneven craftsmanship the play is still exhaustingly painful, but the deadness of feeling that Osborne was anatomising seems now to lack any broader context in particular the political invective of Archie's children is wooden and cliched. Archie and his family belong to that deadly uncommunicative world of English sub- urban emotion that Osborne has described so brilliantly in the autobiographical account of his youth in Epsom. This area of the play has undoubted power yet it only accounts for part of the work's more ambitious scope. You are left at the close with the sense of a miniature, mainly domestic, composition trying to pass itself off as a broad social canvas.
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