BBC: Shakespeare Retold - The Taming of the Shrew (2005) [SPOILERS]
Last night I watched two films in the Shakespeare Retold series, being Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew. I enjoyed them both a great deal.
Given that the Kenneth Branagh / Emma Thompson version will always have the dearest place in my heart, I don't think any version can ever top that one. ginger001 has already written a beautiful review complete with images which you can read here.
My favourite was The Taming of the Shrew which I adored. It was so wonderful to see Rufus Sewell again. I was just thinking when glancing at the reviews for Tristan and Isolde. James Franco? Ho hum, give me Rufus Smouldering Eyed Sewell any old day of the week thank you very much :)
According to the BBC website, the blurb for this remake of Shrew is as follows: "Katherine Minola is a successful politician, tipped for the leadership of her party. The only problem is, her awful temper has left her a 38 year old singleton, and everyone, from her party chairman to her sister, wants her to get married. Is passionate eccentric Petruchio the answer to her prayers?"
This version of Shrew features Shirley Henderson, Rufus Sewell, Jaime Murray, Stephen Tompkinson, Twiggy Lawson and David Mitchell and I personally thought it was a wonderful adaption.
Shirley Henderson plays Katherine Minola, a very successful, formidable and positively terrifying politician whom is headed for the leadership of her party. It's an understatement to say that she has a bad temper. She is absolutely appalling. The way she stalks through the corridors of power with a hideous scowl on her face makes her look like a psychotic, infuriated and very demented pixie. That or a tiny version of the Wicked Witch of the West. She is absolutely tiny but radiates rage and fury at a world of idiots. I found her hilarious if completely unsympathetic and unlovable at the start of the film.
We first meet her when she is dressing down her unfortunate parliamentary aide Tim Agnew.
At the age of 38, she's powerful, formidable and alone. Her advisors tolerate her temper for she is apparently very good at what she does but have as much as told her that she really ought to marry if she wishes to become leader of the opposition given that marriage would quash a few rumours and make her life a little easier.
Her sister Bianca is absolutely beautiful - a very glamourous and feminine model, she is plagued with proposals and all around her adore her. Jaime Murray plays Bianca and she is indeed very beautiful - almost implausibly so and rather reminds me of Claire Forlani.
Stephen Tompkinson in a role rather different from his laddish role in the hilarious Drop the Dead Donkey plays her besotted agent Harry Kavanagh. He is heart-broken when he asks her to marry him for the umpteenth time only to have her announce that she is smitten with a handsome young Italian nineteen year old named Lucentio. Lucentio speaks no English and Bianca speaks no English. Theirs is the language of love, lust and sex......
In Harry's final plea for Bianca to marry him, Bianca fobs him off saying that she'll only marry when her sister does - something which seems about as likely as hell freezing over and all that jazz so it's her way of saying she'll never marry.
Harry himself doesn't take the promise completely seriously but he's heartbroken, desperate and more than a little hungover when his old friend Petruchio comes to down and announces that he's in financial difficulty yet again and must marry money.
I had to giggle, he even quotes Shakespeare even though this is a 'retelling' of Shakespeare and as a rule does not actually use the words of the Bard.
I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
If wealthily, then happily in Padua.
(I.ii.62-73)
Petruchio is as appalling as Kate in his own way. He's loud and noisy, brash, slightly crazy, a spendthrift and unabashedly mercenary about his motivations for matrimony. He is immediately interested when he hears about the wealthy Kate even though Harry tries to explain that Kate while rich, is really awful and quite ugly.
Even after he meets Kate, Petruchio appears undaunted and when they are trapped in a lift together, he announces that they are going to be married and that she is going to bear his children. :) It sounds terrible but he makes it work.
At the first instance, Kate treats him like he's insane and does not take him seriously but Petruchio is somewhat indomitable. Nonetheless, Petruchio is indomitable and very goal-oriented. He woos her ruthlessly and manages to get beneath her skin despite her best intentions. She also discovers that he is an impoverished earl which is one of the factors which convinces her to want to marry him.
I do wish that they'd had Kate saying: "They call me Katherine that do talk of me". :) That would have been a nice tough as it's always been one of my favourite lines, intoned darkly by the Shrewish Kate.
At the wedding though, not only is Petruchio late. He turns up drunk and in high heels, fishnets, makeup and a miniskirt! "I'm not a poof," he reassures her amidst the snapping of cameras - he just likes dressing up as a girl every now and then. *laugh* Poor Katherine is horrified but they struggle their way to the altar and exchange their vows - arguing and squabbling all the way.
After the ceremony, Petruchio immediately removes Kate away to Italy for their honeymoon (for which she has paid) and skips the reception. Inexplicably he also invites Harry along to join them at their Italian villa. Kate is devastated - her career would appear to be over, her moment of romantic insanity appears to have been just that - insanity. I start to feel sorry for her - not just the tears in her eyes but the whole attitude of defeat that we see in her as she phones Tim Agnew to pull out of the party leadership race.
Petruchio is really awful in the moments that follow. They have a flat tyre and he lounges around while Kate changes the tyre - in her wedding dress. He then traps her at the villa by letting the air out of the tyres on the hired car, hiding Kate's phone and clothes. He interrupts her sleep, deprives her of food and teases her with sex which he withholds.....
Poor Kate really is in a bad state by the time Harry arrives. When Harry mournfully speaks of his love for Bianca to Petruchio, there's rather odd expression on Petruchio's face. Harry is speaking of himself and what he believes only he can give Bianca but you receive the distinct impression that Petruchio is coming to realise that he and Kate in their own strange and twisted way - are meant for one another.
While Petruchio goes off to retrieve Kate's luggage, Harry and Kate talk and Kate receives an insight into the weird psyche of her strange and frankly batty husband. I won't go into detail but the two manage to have a meeting of minds of sorts .... reach an understanding and realise that somehow they do love one another .....
I have no idea why I love the Taming of the Shrew so much. As an obstinate and overly opinionated female, this speech from Katherine in the 'traditional' Shrew always had me cringing:
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience,
Too little payment for so great a debt.
. . .
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot,
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready, may it do him ease.
(V.ii.140-183)
I think for my own part, the reason this movie works for me just as the play works for me is that although Katherine purports to speak on behalf of all women, she really can only speak for herself. She's such an obnoxious, complicated, wilful and pigheaded female that in a way she and Petruchio balance one another out. Their relationship works because the two are both as strange and unbalanced as the other. What started in circumstances of dislike, contempt, financial motivations and ulterior motives becomes a relationship of love and mutual understanding. Despite Kate's 'taming', it's obvious that someone like her will never be completely tamed. The married life of Petruchio and Kate will be filled with sparks and excitement - he'll never have a quiet day in his life and he'll probably relish it.
In the movie version, Kate discovers that her aide Tim has ignored her instructions and despite everything - she is the leader of her party - and a very successful one. :)
The above 'hands below your husband’s foot' speech is used in the context of Bianca attempting to force Lucentio into signing a pre-nuptual agreement. Katherine's declaration is that wives should obey their husbands, and if Bianca needs a pre-nuptial agreement, she shouldn't be getting married at all. Perhaps I like it because I'm personally opposed to pre-nuptial agreements. First of all, I agree that they are in a way admitting defeat before you've even started. Secondly, as Kate naughtily whispers to Petruchio - they're frequently quite useless anyway so it's almost a lot of effort for nothing! :)
I loved this production. Shirley Henderson is hilarious. Her voice is absolutely awful - hissing, menacing and frightening. She was Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter which is hilarious given that she is 41 this year! As I said, she's completely convincing as a shrew - she's an absolute bitch, but she's so good at conveying the loneliness and she's very vulnerable despite her toughness.
Rufus Sewell. What can I say about him? He's magnificent. Even dressed in drag he's hot - there's something so wrong about that but there you have it.
He also has a very intense way of looking at Katherine which is very fascinating. You can see his mind working, see him being mercenary and calculating, see him changing, trusting, thinking, regretting and in the end you can see that he has fallen in love.
I've never thought that Rufus Sewell was particularly good-looking, but he's incredibly compelling and attractive. I laughed at him for his portrayal of the earthy, oversexed Seth Starkadder in the hilarious Thomas Hardy-esque parody Cold Comfort Farm ("I saw something nasty in the woodshed!!") but I found him mesmerising as Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch (love the book, love the series!). I also loved him in Dark City, A Destiny of Her Own/Dangerous Beauty and Hamlet and I cannot wait to see him in Tristan & Isolde although as I've already mentioned, I will have a major problem with the fact that I find James Franco about as attractive as a bus ticket.
Other things I liked were that Bianca and Katherine are actually quite convincing as sisters. Despite the antipathy and their differences - they have a rather lovely relationship and they do love one another even if Katherine's always losting her temper and screwing up. I liked Bianca and it's the first time I've liked the Bianca character in a production of Shrew.
In the play and in this adapation, Kate falls in love with Petruchio at the end. I've always felt that Petruchio falls in love with Kate despite himself and in this adaption, it's very clear to me that Petruchio falls for Kate ..... Unexpectedly and a little reluctantly but he falls nonetheless.
Links
Official BBC site
Lots of information at this Rufus Sewell site