The Taming of the Shrew
1980: Jonathan Miller
Almost at the very opposite end of the spectrum from Zeffirelli’s and Browning’s renditions, is this entry into the BBC Shakespeare Plays series. Reactions to it were very mixed, and a number of people vehemently disliked it. A number of others have told me that they thought it was far and away the best version of The Taming of the Shrew ever made or ever likely to be made.
Costumes and staging are minimal, but adequate. One does not expect the lavish from the BBC Shakespeare Plays. The heart of its strategy, though, is that it casts John Cleese of Monty Python fame (a remarkably capable actor) as Petruchio. Rather than the swaggering braggart-conqueror one finds in most productions of The Taming of the Shrew, he plays a role rather like his nameless character in The Great Muppet Caper, who watches Miss Piggy scaling the outside of his house with a kind of bemused detachment. Here also he hems his role around with a very drily humorous English reticence, appearing to be perpetually perplexed, but at the same time wholly unrattled by anything that happens, making weird decisions less in an attempt to be coercive than just because he never seems to get what’s going on. In the end, his apparently unassailable imperturbability wears Katherine down. Doing this to the character of Petruchio is in most ways counter-intuitive, but the effect is (to my taste) oddly appealing. Whether one likes the film or not, however, it forms, in conjunction with the Zeffirelli production and maybe one or two others, a case study in how flexibly one can approach Shakespeare without transgressing the basic sense of the text.
Baptista’s Servant: Bev Willis
Baptista: John Franklyn-Robbins
Bianca: Susan Penhaligon
Biondello: Harry Waters
Curtis: Angus Lennie
Gregory: Leslie Sarony
Gremio: Frank Thornton
Grumio: David Kincaid
Haberdasher: David Kinsey
Hortensio: Jonathan Cecil
Katherine: Sarah Badel
Lucentio: Simon Chandler
Nathaniel: Harry Webster
Nicholas: Derek Deadman
Officer: Tony Martell
Pedant: John Bird
Peter: Denis Gilmore
Petruchio: John Cleese
Philip: Gil Morris
Tailor: Alan Hay
Tranio: Anthony Pedley
Vincentio: John Barron
Widow: Joan Hickson
Buy the complete BBC Shakespeare Plays at Amazon. Note that this will require a Region 2 player or a region-free player: it will not play on most normal American DVD players. Nevertheless, the price is so reasonable that even with a region-free player thrown into the deal, you’ll come out ahead.
Buy the BBC Shakespeare Plays Comedy Giftbox at Amazon. Unlike the complete series, this is in a North American video format, and it includes five plays: As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merchant of Venice.
Buy the complete set of the BBC Shakespeare Plays or individual plays (including this one) in Region 1 format direct from Ambrose Video.