Nehad Selaiha enjoys watching The Taming of the Shrew transported out of Padua to an imaginary Hispanic town Long before the advent of feminism, The Taming of the Shrew (or The Shaming of the True, as one quibbling critic once called it) was frequently considered a thoroughly embarrassing play -- an unfortunate lapse into coarse chauvinism on the side of the Bard. As far back as 1897, George Bernard Shaw found its seemingly complacent, tongue-in-cheek chauvinism and misogynistic celebration of patriarchy and female submission deeply offensive. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, he described it as "one vile insult to womanhood and manhood from the first word to the last" and "altogether disgusting to modern sensibility" (he letter, dated June 8, 1888, is reproduced in full in Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works, a Critical Biography, Montana: Kessinger, 2004, 196) Nine years later, he was still of the same mind, writing of the famous (infamous?) final scene in The Saturday Review, on 6 November, 1897 that: "No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord- of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman's own mouth." Shaw's virulent condemnation of the Shrew has since been echoed by many scholars and critics. Reviewing Michael Bogdanov's famous 1977 RSC modern dress production, starring Jonathan Pryce and Paola Dionisotti, Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, on 5 May 1977, that rather than give him pleasure, the performance had given him ample reason to think that perhaps it was advisable, after all, to restore censorship on what was put on the stage, and wound up his article wondering if there was any justification at all for reviving such an offensive and shameful play and whether it would not have been better to leave it on the bookshelves where it rightfully belongs. Indeed, even in Shakespeare's own day, as one scholar (Dana E. Aspinall) has argued, when "arranged marriages began to give way to newer, more romantically informed experiments, ... and people's views on women's position in society, and their relationships with men, were in the process of shifting, ... audiences may not have been as predisposed to enjoy the harsh treatment of Katharina as is often thought." With the arrival of feminist critics on the scene in the 1970s, the inherent misogyny in the Petruchio/Katharina story, his use of food and sleep deprivation to break her spirit and will and coerce her into blindly obeying him and conforming to the patriarchal image of the ideal wife, not to mention the ever present threat of violence he poses by his constant bawling, sour temper and brutal treatment of his servants, came into sharp focus, influencing many directors and dramaturges. The most extreme example of such feminist interpretations of the play was, perhaps, Charles Marowitz's controversial 1975 production The Shrew, performed at The Studio in the Sydney Opera House. "Refashioned as a gothic tale, the adaptation removed all the comedy, and instead concentrated on examining the themes of sadism and brain washing. Petruchio was played by Stuart Campbell as a savage and vicious misogynist, who rapes and beats Katharina (Elaine Hudson), ultimately driving her mad. At the end of the play, as Katharina delivers her speech, she does so as if she has learned it, without any emotion or inflection. In this version, the happy ending of Shakespeare's play thus takes on a disturbing irony" (Thompson, Ann (ed.), The Taming of the Shrew, The New Cambridge Shakespeare; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; 2nd ed. 2003, 24). The same disturbing irony shadows Conall Morrison's 2008 RSC production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, where Katharina appears in the final scene as a woman who has been 'crushed' and 'lobotomized', to use the director's own words. Morrison, however, sees the play as 'a moral tale' that warns against misogyny and patriarchal oppression rather than condones them. The treatment of Katharina "is so self-evidently repellent that" he does not "believe for a second that Shakespeare is espousing this", he protests. Rather, as he further explains, the play is "very obviously a satire on this male behaviour and a cautionary tale" in which Shakespeare is "investigating misogyny, exploring it and animating it and obviously damning it because none of the men come out smelling of roses. When the chips are down they all default to power positions and self- protection and status and the one woman who was a challenge to them, with all her wit and intellect, they are all gleeful and relieved to see crushed". To put across this reading of the play, Morrison kept the meta- theatrical framing device, often referred to as the Induction, changing it a bit to suit his purposes. In the original Induction, based on a story from The Arabian Nights about the Abbasid khalif Haroun Al-Rashid, an English Lord on a hunting trip meets a drunken, penniless tinker, named Sly, at an alehouse on a heath where he stops to rest; to amuse himself, the mischievous Lord plays a practical joke on the tinker, tricking him, with the help of his clown and servants, into thinking he is a nobleman for a night. [The same story was put to excellent dramatic use by Naguib El-Rihani in one of his plays, later turned into a famous movie called Salama fi Kheir (Salama in Clover) and also by Syrian playwright Sa'dallah Wannus in his widely acclaimed and much celebrated satirical play, Al-Malik Huwa Al-Malik (The King is the King).] In The Shrew, however, the Lord, unlike Haroun Al-Rashid, has a play performed for Sly's amusement, set in Padua, with a main plot featuring Petruchio's rough-and- tumble courting and 'taming' of the unruly, shrewish, but wealthy Katharina, and a sub-plot featuring the wooing of her younger, docile sister Bianca by several rival suitors and involving many disguises and intrigues. By changing the Lord in the Induction into a Lady, who also plays Katharina, thus willingly letting Sly (who also plays Petruchio) oppress and torment her, Morrison projected the play from a new, feminist perspective as a study of the male mind and behaviour in patriarchal societies, or, in the director's words, as a " Big Brother type social experiment" (RSC 'Exploring Shakespeare', Play Guide). Morrison's impassioned defense of The Shrew against the charge of misogyny or sexism is symptomatic of a common response to the play that Welsh novelist Stevie Davies has described in 1995 as one "dominated by feelings of unease and embarrassment, accompanied by the desire to prove that Shakespeare cannot have meant what he seems to be saying; and that therefore he cannot really be saying it." The same response has prompted many scholars, critics and directors to highlight the importance of the frequently omitted framing Induction, arguing that, as a play-within-a-play presented in the course of a hoax by strolling actors, the taming of Katharina should be presented and received either as a farce, or, at best, as a lively but mild satire on the bourgeoisie, its mercenary drives, hypocritical attitudes and false stereotypes. This was the approach adopted by Ian Talbot in the production he directed for the New Shakespeare Players company and brought to the Cairo Opera house in April 1994. As I wrote in the Weekly at the time: "He set the play in a circus tent, dressed and moved his characters like clowns and puppets, played up the element of knockabout farce, and bolstered it with a strong dose of tumbling and juggling, a lot of skipping and prancing and a touch of hip wiggling. He also provided a mock pantomime horse, dressed in big black and white checks and red stockings, and made him sit down, crossing all four legs and coyly eye the audience. ... To complete the carnival atmosphere, he provided a crazy medley of sounds, orchestrating the voices of the actors from deep bass to shrill soprano, making three of them sing a portion of the dialogue to the tune of 'Here we go round the mulberry bush' and leading Guy Burgess to deliver Biondello's description of Petruchio's horse as a rap song." Nevertheless, and despite the general boisterousness, by whole-heartedly embracing the essential and all-pervading theatricality of the play, Talbot managed to project it as a social satire and make Katharina and Petruchio into his satirical agents. He presented them "as two rebellious people and social outsiders who start off as antagonists, locked in a traditional battle of the sexes, and end up transcending it and joining hands to expose the fraudulence of the social rules, roles and images which give rise to it, together with all the love-lorn swains, simpering, coy damsels, submissive wives and daughters, masterful husbands and venerable patriarchs, and other such silly clichés." In productions such as Talbot's, one does not need to justify the play in terms of history, or view it, as we are sometimes advised, in its historical context, against the background of the barbaric treatment of wives in the middle ages. This may work for scholars; but for ordinary theatergoers, historical facts and contexts count for very little when experiencing a live performance, and no amount of them will help them make sense of a play or relate to it if it fails to come alive to them in performance. It is all very well for some scholars to argue, as Ann Barton does in "The Taming of the Shrew" (The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., New York, Boughton Mifflin Company, 1997. 138), that "by comparison with the husband who binds his erring spouse, beats her, bleeds her into a state of debility or incarcerates her inside the salted skin of a dead horse ... Petruchio -- although no Romeo -- is almost a model of intelligence and humility." However, if a production presumes to give a sympathetic rendering of Petruchio's conduct and Katharina's subsequent reforming (or deforming) on no better grounds than this, it might as well save itself the trouble. When Leila Saad invited me to see her AUC production of The Shrew, I could not help wondering at her choice of play. Currently, women's rights in Egypt are coming under heavy fire from the conservative camp and the call to force women out of the public sphere and back into their traditionally inherited roles and consigned spaces is increasingly finding many a welcoming ear. It is not uncommon to hear it hollered from the pulpit of a mosque, or screamed into a loudspeaker by some frenzied preacher in the course of his Friday sermon. The niqab is on the rise, and so is domestic violence against females of all ages, and the physical abuse of women and children is often condoned as therapy for disobedience. Do we need Petruchio's 'taming lessons' on top of all this? Besides, since most girls in Egypt, and indeed the whole of the Arab world, are reared on female submissiveness from early infancy, until it becomes almost a second nature to them, while boys are brought up to expect it as a birth right and religious privilege, do we really need Katharina to preach to us what the school text books, the media, the performing arts and much of the circulating popular literature constantly bombard us with? For most Arab men, and I dare say many Arab women, The Taming of the Shrew would seem a perfectly unproblematic play, completely in harmony with the inherited values and traditional perceptions of males and females. Unlike in the West, where the play's apparent misogyny has been the subject of heated controversy for at least a century, this aspect, if at all noticed in Egypt, would hardly raise an eyebrow or stir up any thoughts. Could this explain why The Shrew spawned so many stage productions and screen, opera, radio, television and musical theatre adaptations in the West while in Egypt it rarely appears on the curriculum of English departments at Egyptian universities, has not been seen on the Egyptian stage since the 1920s, when George Abyad reportedly staged it, and is better or solely known to the majority of Egyptians in an Egyptianized version adapted for the screen and starring the highly attractive Lubna Abdel Aziz and Egyptian movie male idol, Rushdi Abaza? As has been often noted, whenever a decision to put on The Shrew is taken, directors and actors alike are immediately confronted with the fundamental question of interpretation: do they play it straight? For laughs? Or ironically? On the long bus journey to Malak Gabr theatre at the AUC new campus in New Cairo where Saad's Shrew was staged, I kept wondering what option Saad had made. As it turned out, she had opted for all 3, presenting some scenes straight, as in realistic, social comedies, others, ironically, with satirical intent, and the rest in a farcical vein for laughs. The galloping rhythm of the performance and the physical liveliness of the movement, which at times spiraled into sheer violence, helped knit the different tones and styles tightly together, making the quick transitions smooth and hardly noticeable. Saad directed passionately, instinctively, with physical intuition rather than cerebral deliberation. Having disposed of the framing Induction, as many directors do, she embraced the play, with all its characters and actions, whether good or bad, wholeheartedly, delighting in everything and judging nothing. To free her creative imagination from previous readings and interpretations and allow herself to present the play as she 'feels' it rather than as what she 'thinks' it ought to mean, she packed up the play in her bag, as it were, and escaped with it to a new, imaginary place of her own creation, hilariously called 'Bodega', a Spanish word which refers to a wine and grocery shop in Hispanic societies. I had sensed something vaguely Spanish, about Stancil Campbell's charming, multi-level/location setting, with its old-town atmosphere, warm, earthy colours, arched doors and windows, stone steps, garden walls, street fountain and roofed in colonnades (all enchantingly lit by Kelly Allison), while Jeanne Arnold's costumes, particularly the ponchos, leather trousers and wide-rimmed hats intriguingly hinted at South America and earlier periods. However, when the word 'Bodega' hit my ears for the first time, cunningly replacing 'Padua', where Shakespeare set the play, I was truly startled and this, somehow, seemed to provide the key to the performance and how it should be received. Though the style of acting was alternately realistic, comically exaggerated, or downright farcical, it did not seem to matter since this was 'Bodega' -- a new land with its own laws and logic, where opposites can coexist side by side without clashing and the harshness of reality is tempered by the shadows of playful fancy. Curiously, in this imaginary setting, the characters seemed to grow transparent, revealing what lies beneath their outward masks and pretences. Katharina (Dahlia Abou Azama) revealed the pathetically neglected and lonely child she carefully hides behind her shrewish facade, making her outbreaks of violence seem like desperate appeals for love and attention, or the impotent outbursts of a resentful child who, like Cordelia, has not yet learnt the art of winning love with wily pretences. Indeed, in this production, Bianca, delightfully played with covert slyness, suppressed vigour and feline softness by Noha Gaafar, seemed the older of the two sisters, with more experience of the world and of how to manipulate men to do exactly as she pleases. But even Bianca eventually drops her masks in this performance, revealing in the way she cuddles up to Lucentio (Alaa Shafei) a warm person longing for true love. Jason Will's captivatingly handsome and dashing Petruchio partook of the same transparency which marks the rendering of the characters in this production. Within a few minutes of his appearance, one begins to sense that behind all his blustering, swagger, uncouthness and physical roughness, there lay a sunny, open nature, at once free and robust, and capable of generous affection. At no time in the performance do we feel that Katharina is really threatened, and when she obeys him on the way to her father's house, calling the sun the moon and a wrinkled old man a fair damsel, she does this with an amused, indulgent smile, like a mother humouring a wayward and obstinate child; and when she delivers her famous speech at the wedding banquet, she does so with no real conviction, but with pride and dignity, as if to shame her father and the people who had earlier maligned her. In both cases, Petruchio's reaction is telling: in the former he smiles appreciatively back at her, with a twinkle of amusement; and in the latter he seems to understand what she is exactly doing and looks visibly moved. Though the rest of the characters are strictly one-dimensional, with no room for the actor to flex his emotional muscles or grope for some or psychological padding, it is a credit to Leila Saad that in some cases -- particularly in Alaa Shalaby's Baptista, Alaa Shafei's Lucentio, Mustafa Khalil's Gremio, Mike Bali's Hortensio and even Mark Visona's clownish Grumio -- the actors' facial expressions, gestures, tones of voice, pauses and physical postures seemed to hint at nebulous depths and hidden feelings, making them more real and humanly credible. Though The Taming of the Shrew is not among my Shakespearean favourites and always offends in the reading, particularly the passages which speak of women as commodities or property, or cheerfully advocate their subjugation and extol their submissiveness, and though Leila Saad carefully skirts the gender issues the play raises, preferring a thoroughly benevolent and more romantic approach, I positively enjoyed her production. In her hands, the play became a zestful celebration of youth, love, wit, physical vitality and high spirits. And this is the magic of theatre.
