Reviews

Reviews of productions of The Taming of the Shrew in the Project and Da in the Olympia, Dublin.

The Taming of the Shrew, Project, Dublin

Before the start of Michael Bogdanov's 1978 production of The Taming of the Shrew at Stratford, a drunk man entered the auditorium, arguing violently with the attendant who was trying to show him to his seat: "I'm not having any bloody woman telling me what to do." He then stumbled onto stage and wrecked the set. Some members of the audience took such fright that they didn't wait around for the drunk to re-appear as the swaggering Petruchio and the attendant as Kate, the headstrong woman whose will he breaks. Discomfiting as the device was, it was one solution to the problem of the play. How can a contemporary audience enjoy a comedy about the humbling of a fiery woman and the enforcement of due obedience to her lord, master and husband? Most directors who take the problem seriously identify two pressure points within Shakespeare's text. One is that he has framed the story of Petruchio and Kate as a play-within-a-play. It is enacted before a drunken beggar who is fooled into thinking he is a lord, thus allowing a director to present it at a satiric distance. The other is that Kate is starved and tormented into submission and that her distress can disconcert the comedy, forcing the audience to question the story itself. Together these two points provide openings for a post-feminist sensibility.

Lynne Parker's richly enjoyable but problematic production for Rough Magic ignores both of these possibilities. The framing device of the drunken beggar is simply scrapped and with it goes the notion of the main action as a self-conscious game. And Pauline McLynn's Kate is a curiously subdued presence. Nearly hidden in a big wig and elaborate dresses, she is placed almost on the periphery of the action, so neither her shrewish persona nor its transformation into mild humility has much emotional content.

The burden of commentary on the text is carried instead by Monica Frawley's brilliant sets and costumes. The set is a seedy, early-1970s rural Irish lounge bar, all synthetics and cigarette ash. The costumes are a glorious pastiche of fashion disasters from the 1950s to the 1970s. The underlying notion is that all of this creates a visual distance, placing us in the bad old days of a church-dominated Ireland where women were kept in their place. Kate's humiliation is the humiliation of Irish women in general. This works well up to a point. The setting absolves a contemporary audience of complicity in the story's ultimate viciousness. This, it implies, is the way we used to be, but not the way we are now. Thus released, the play can be enjoyed as a broad comedy rooted in commedia dell'arte. Yet the familiarity of the recent Irish past can also give the cast a firm grip on the characters. Thus Darragh Kelly's Gremio, the rich old suitor of Kate's sister Bianca becomes, to great effect, a refugee from John B Keane's Sive. Barry McGovern, as the sisters' father, is a rural businessman on holiday from a Lennox Robinson play..

It's a lot of fun, and the cast relishes the pace and verve of Parker's lucid staging. The contrast between a dingy rural Ireland and the nominal setting in Renaissance Italy allows Parker to inject mock-heroic humour in which, for example, lavish feasts become plates of mean white sandwiches. The stripping away of romance extends to the figure of Bianca, who is evoked in the language as an icon of female radiance. Simone Kirby plays her, with a lovely comic touch, as a bit of a slapper, fond both of flesh and drink. Agreeable as all of this is, it leaves intact the basic problem of the play's climax, when Petruchio wagers on Kate's obedience and she proves her absolute submission.

Parker tries to deal with the problem by implying Kate is in on the bet and by having her defiantly kiss another man. This would make sense if we had seen a more complex, troubled Kate earlier in the play. As it is, the messages are confused and a vibrant production ends in hesitancy, having shown itself far from tamed but not quite shrewd enough. - Fintan O'Toole

Until Mar 25

Da, Olympia Theatre, Dublin

Memories are unreliable creatures. They loosen, bow to suggestion, and come upon you in the most unlikely places. A little like Art NI's production of Da, where Hugh Leonard's memory play occasionally burns vividly but often grows vague and distended.

Irascible, arrogant, quick to take offence and slow to lose a grudge, the playwright and protagonist, Charlie, is often understood to be Leonard himself. Were that true, it's a deeply unsympathetic portrait. Charlie, however, seems too self-involved to ever write a play such as Da, set in Dublin in 1968, a comic drama in which the playwright comes to bury his adoptive father, not to praise him - and achieves the opposite.

As the playwright, Charles Lawson fully engages in petulant argument and unending embarrassment with the returning spirits of his father (Clive Geraghty), his mother (Olivia Nash) and - in the play's most narcissistic conceit - his younger self (Michael Condron). But where Lawson achieves the not inconsiderable task of rendering his character's affectations speakable ("I'd just propelled another erudite remark across the table"), it is Geraghty's artless Da who receives the play's music.

Innocent, idiosyncratic and endearingly oblivious to mockery, Geraghty's performance is big-hearted and involving; you immediately warm to him, safe in the knowledge you don't have to live with him. Not every cast member in this Northern Irish production is quite so comfortable, though. Where the excellent Gerry Doherty (an unlikely, doughy-featured choice for the implacable, alternative father-figure, Drumm) retains a soft Northern burr, Leonard's crucial Dublin accents wriggle free from several players and exchanges sag under their discomfort.

Perhaps this explains the trundling pace of Dan Gordon's production. Where Conlith White's sparing design and cartoonish backdrop understand that Leonard's play should glide and zing, Gordon's staging feels faithful but mechanical. In the end, it falls to Da himself to carry the evening. Stirring our memories and sealing our fate, Da remains difficult to leave behind and impossible to escape. - Peter Crawley

Until Mar 11