STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
The Taming of the Shrew is the play of Shakespeare's which is least capable of giving pleasure today either when it is read or when it is acted. Considered as literature, its interest is almost negligible ; and it can be made effective in the theatre only by a more or less wholesale disregard for those scruples on the observance of which all reverent Shakespeareans insist. Structurally it consists of a brief Induction and a long play within a play. The Induction, whose only purpose is to justify the circumstances of what follows it, contains the only treatment of real nature, and therefore the only real drama, that the play has in it ; the comedy of the practical joke played on Christopher Sly is slight, but the scene is alive and amusing. The play within a play that follows when it is over is as superficial and extravagant (and twenty times as long) as that other interlude which dislocates the movement of Hamlet. To produce without injuring the susceptibilities of pedants this formalised flummery in. which Shakespeare, wrapping one fiction within another, erected a second wall between drama and life, is in the modern theatre merely to add one absurdity to another.
Alice Meynell pointed to the only hope for a producer of The Taming of the Shrew when she wrote that "such as it is, it must be taken with gaiety, without insistence, without exacticin, and in haste." The only fault of Mr. Gurney's production is in its pace. He has denied himself no liberty in the effort to persuade his audiences to forget what they learned about Shakespeare in the course of their education and to accept The Taming of the Shrew simply as an amusing farce. He has manhandled the text as the whim took him, giving some of the lines of one character to another ; Petruchio's horse is put through its paces in a gay little dance ; a group of grim figures (deserters from the theatre of Mr. Auden) perform a ballet While they jerk the sheets from Katherina's bridal bed ; the joint of which Petruchio complains is handled as a football and rushed from the room in a brisk three-quarters movement among his servants. All these innovations are in themselves effective and entertaining. They give to the scenes in which they occur gaiety and life. • But their collective effect is to retard the movement of a play in the performance of which pace is, as Mrs. Meynell said, essential. A similar criticism must be made of Miss Zinkeisen's decorations. All of them, costumes, interiors, and distant prospects are enchantment itself. The trouble is that they so captivate the eye that attention is diverted from the play. When the eye can be induced to leave them and return to the process of events the mind has too much leeway to make up.
I have said that Mr. Gurney's production has only one fault, its pace. There is indeed another cardinal flaw, but I do not know whether a producer can be held responsible for the failure of one actress to adjust her temperament to the producer's general scheme. Mr. Gurney has thought of this play in terms of farce, and most of his actors have performed it in those terms. But Miss Edith Evans' Katherina throws his whole idea off its balance. Her performance is vivid and dynamic, but it is conceived and executed almost exclusively in terms of tragedy. Again and again she is completely at odds with the rest of the company in fixing the emphasis of a scene, and some of her passages with Petruchio become absurd. Mr. Leslie Banks' Petruchio was on the whole delight- ful, but as a result of Miss Evans' intensity one often felt that, instead of subduing her, this comparatively passionless and sthall-voiced man would have collapsed under the assault of such a sullen and heavily tragic shrew. That this production is on the whole such a success is due in the main to the perfor- 'fiances in the smaller parts—notably Mr. George Howe's admirable Baptists, Mr. Mark • Daly's Grumio, Mr. Anthony Ireland's Tranio, Mr. Alec Chutes' Lucentio, and above all Mn Arthur Sinclair's superb Sly. That it is a success, and a success worth achieving, will be denied only by those who would rather that The Taming of the Shrew were kept in pedantic cold storage than that an attempt should be made by means the reverse of scholarly to make it palatable to the
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