The Globe Theatre and “Taming of the Shrew”: Last night, we went to the Globe Theatre with Kathy and Jim and saw “Taming of the Shrew”. We had never been to the Globe before. It attempts to be a re-creation of the original theatre, although no one really know what that building looked like. It has three levels of benches (they will rent you cushions) surrounding a standing area which contains the stage. (In Elizabethan times, the poor would stand and the upper classes and nobility would sit on the stalls.) There is no roof over the standing area and a only part of the stage is covered, so you can get quite wet going to a play there. I took a picture before the play started, which you can see below. It gives you a good idea of the theatre layout. Unfortunately, it also illustrates that our view was slightly blocks by the pillar holding up the roof over the stage.

The production itself was OK. One of the things they appear to like to do at the Globe is intersperse music in the plays, which I am willing to guess is what they did originally. So there is a small band playing on a level above and behind the stage. This production was pretty broadly played most of the time. There were lots of sight gags and the actors would occasionally break the “fourth wall” and involve the audience, especially those standing along the front of the stage. Between that and the music, it gave the whole thing a feel of what Elizabethan theatre might have been like. I liked that part. Because of where we were sitting  and the fact that the actors are not miked, I missed some of the lines, but I know the play pretty well and really heard all of the important bits. It was enjoyable.

However, I had two complaints about the way it was directed. First, while much of the play was acted broadly and aiming for laughs, the scenes between Petruchio and Kate seemed to go beyond the simple misogyny of the play into a kind of brutality. It was more like Gitmo interrogation than Petruchio taming his shrewish wife. I just couldn’t get any underlying affection, so when Kate finally agrees that the moon is the sun, etc., it is more like she is a broken POW or a hostage suffering from the Stockholm syndrome than a woman having a human relationship. I know that the play is misogynistic and sexist, but this interpretation was really quite creepy.

The other thing that bothered me about the production was the director’s effort to tie “Taming of the Shrew” to the Easter Rebellion in Ireland (it is the hundredth anniversary) and the Irish’s abject failure to produce the promised reforms sought by the many women who fought in that Rebellion. It meant that the acts opened and ended with angry Irish ballads and the actors all had thick Irish brogues (making it all slightly harder to understand) and wore modernish Irish clothes, which was fine I suppose, although you wouldn’t have known that it had anything to do with the Easter Rebellion without reading the programme. I’m guessing that this Easter Rebellion reference influenced the way the Petruchio and Kate scenes were played. I guess the idea was to make the point that women were treated as property and that Petruchio treated Kate as he would a wild horse to be tamed. Its pretty simplistic and it robs the play of any real interpersonal relationship between the two of them, making the end of the play unsatisfying and vaguely depressing. I suppose portraying Petruchio as an awful, hyper-sexist, sadistic jerk might have worked if the rest of the play had been darker and the other men had at least a vaguely similar outlook. But since the rest of the cast was playing it for humor and a more normal interpretation, Petruchio comes off as as psychopath. Oddly, I think this may have been the director’s intent.

The acting was good, of course, and you can’t blame them for the unsettling interpretation of the central relationship. I understand that it is tempting to add a twist to the interpretation of Shakespeare since the plays have been done so often. But sometimes, the director gets in the way of the play itself.

The Vote Approaches: Speaking of unsatisfying and depressing, the campaign leading to vote on the Brexit referendum is winding down and vote will be on Thursday. The two sides took some time off last week after the truly tragic murder of MP Jo Cox, a woman who had spent her entire life trying to help the poor and oppressed, first as an OXFAM worker and later as a charismatic MP. It seems pretty clear to me that ugly, coded racist, and anti-immigrant rhetoric of some of the particularly strident and awful Leave proponents (a minority I grant you), encouraged the far right killer to feel that his act was justified, although few are willing to come out and say it. It probably won’t impact the final outcome, although one might argue that it broke the seeming momentum that the Leave side seemed to have ten days ago and could disgust enough people to make a difference it what will likely be a close vote. It is really a question of turnout. In particular, if young voters, who are said to overwhelmingly support Remain, show up at the polls, that side would easily. But they won’t, so it up in the air. It will be interesting to see the reaction of the losing side.