Theatre
Tinker's Fuss
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE
The Taming of the Shrew. (Aldwych.)—A Whistle in the Dark, (Theatre Royal, Strat- ford E.) THE date of The Tam- ing of the Shrew is unknown, but it is prob- ably later than 1594, the year in which another author's play called The Taming of a Shrew was printed. This play, which Shakespeare perhaps rewrote and enlarged a year or two later, made much more use of Chris- topher Sly, the tinker whom a nobleman finds in a drunken stupor and dresses up as a rich lord, and for whom the company of strolling Players perform the comedy of the shrew. In Shakespeare's version Sly interrupts the comedy only once, after the first scene. He is already nodding off, and his one critical comment when he is nudged awake is: "Tis a very excellent piece of work; would 'twere done.' He pre- sumably sleeps from then on; we hear no more of him, whereas in the 1594 play he had inter- rupted throughout the evening and had gone home at the end, dressed once again in his rags, determined to set about taming his own shrewish wife.
The Aldwych production, redirected by Maurice Daniels from last year's Stratford pro- duction with Peggy Ashcroft, takes all these in- terruptions by Christopher Sly and fits them into Shakespeare's text. The grafting gives several ex- cellent moments—as when Sly, using his new lordly power to rectify an old tinker's grudge, prevents the arrest of two characters with a cry of 'I say we'll have no sending to prison'—but the good moments are outweighed by two severe disadvantages. The first is that it is diflicult to provide a large enough stage audience to watch the play with Sly. For most of this production Sly and his lady'—a male servant hastily decked out in dress and wig—sit by themselves at the side of the stage. In their lonely vigil they seem more like bird-watchers than playgoers.
The second disadvantage is much more serious. The play-within-a-play convention has tempted Mr. Daniels to direct the comedy of the shrew in a style that will appeal to the oafish Sly. This means the most mechanical type of knockabout farce. When doors are opened, the people coming in and the people going out bump heads neatly in the middle. A clown, faced with a long speech about Petruchio's arrival, gabbles it incompre- hensibly, but his capers while doing so are nothing short of regimental; and when he has breathlessly reached the end he reclines on the ground, one, two, three, takes a carrot froin his pocket and starts eating it. Actors are reduced by such antics to comic robots who, miracu- lously, can form almost articulate words. Never mind the sense; the wonder is that they can speak at all.
The Taming of the Shrew, indeed, takes its place as a brave new advance in the Stratford company's assault on the spoken word. After seeing Peter Hall's recent productions one can only conclude that his regime actually shares Christopher Sly's taste in theatre, his preference for `a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick.' For, after all, the idea of playing to please Chris- topher Sly can't even claim any antiquarian authenticity, any element of `this is how it must have been in Shakespeare's time.' Sly's solitary interruption at the end of the first scene makes it quite plain that he found Shakespeare's comedy a most infernal bore.
The only relief from all the grunting and grin- ning comes in the encounters between Petruchio and Kate. Derek Godfrey is astoundingly ver- satile. He can blow rich notes from a most im- probable-looking horn or piercing whistles through his fingers; he can accompany himself,. pleasingly on a lute; he can strut about like a turkey-cock; and besides all this he can act. Petruchio's confident arrogance may give an actor an almost sure-fire role, but there is plenty in this production to put a less good one off his aim.
The part of Kate is more problematical. She tends to seem either exaggerated before her taming or tepid after it. Vanessa Redgrave's Kate, a most magnificent beast with a great pile of red hair, errs if anything in the first direction —I would have welcomed a hint that there was something besides natural viciousness in her cruelty to her sister—but she comes completely into her own in the later scenes. This is a creature who has been well worth the taming, and she complies with Petruchio's idiocies about the sun and moon not abjectly but with a smile: she has for the first time found a relationship with a human being and she is prepared to humour the man's foibles. So her final speech about the role of wives becomes a private exul- tation between Petruchio and herself, instead of just a sickening homily on obedience. Before closing this short but rich list of credits, Roy Dotrice's racy performance as Christopher .Sly must be mentioned. And Alix Stone's set has a certain Hansel and Gretel charm.
The predicament of the weak man involved with a gang of toughs is a hard-worked theme in theatre, film and fiction, but it remains very real and frightening. In A Whistle in the Dark Thomas Murphy extends the usual situation by making the gang of toughs the man's own family. Instead of blackmail and physical violence, the pressures brought to bear on him are family loyalty and physical violence. Michael Carney, a drunken layabout, has brought his sons up to believe that they are 'the fighting Carneys,' a law unto themselves. The eldest son resists his influence, but the other four become petty and violent crooks. They start using the respectable son's home as a base for their operations. They get drunk and smash up the place, they jeer at him and his wife, they taunt him with cowardice; and nothing he can do will get them out. At times in the first two acts the play catches well the horror of his position, but the third lapses into melodrama. The author, obviously all too aware of the need to differen- tiate between the five brothers, has gone too far and has created five types instead of five people. But the cast in the Theatre Royal pro- duction is excellent.
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