And so to the theatre, there to be entertained greatly by Lucy Bailey’s highly inventive staging for the Royal Shakespeare Company of the Bard’s problematic old chestnut, The taming of the shrew. Period dress, but the period was circa late ’40s Italy, working well. Lisa Dillon played Katharina as an out of control hard-drinking Courtney Love, while sister Bianca could have come straight off the set (or album cover) of Dreamboats and petticoats, and David Caves as Petruchio was a study in intelligent mocking brash. His great height and hard-hinted Northern Irish accent and Katherina’s short stature made for some good moments.
The set was interesting even before anyone stepped on it, even more so when it became an integral part of the business and fun that kept everything beautifully in motion. It consisted of a mound covered by a huge sheet, rising to a classical wall full of shuttered openings that functioned variously as doors and windows, the occasional comic use of which recalled Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (the ancient groundbreaking American TV comedy that some of you will remember), the sheet performing a number of roles as the action progressed, not least as a bed. There was a fair amount of farce in the mix, particularly with the supporting cast and plot-lines, with some great comic characterisations drawing on half a century of popular culture, but there was some terrific acting going on too.
The actual taming – the route march – was a brutal display of brainwashing. The Prologue, or Induction, was not dropped, so the action was framed, giving us the play-within-a-play get-out for Shakespeare‘s pronounced misogynist streak in this text. Before delivering the notorious acquiescence speech at the end, Katharina lit a cigarette and continued smoking throughout, a sign, maybe, that she was still holding something in reserve. Much was made of the drunken Christopher Sly character, a comic tour de force from the substantial Nick Holder, who gave a woman a couple of rows back in stalls a shock at the start that she’ll be dining on for a few years hence, I’ll wager. The audience came out buzzing.
I didn’t get the joke in the title of Bateman‘s The day of the Jack Russell (Headline, 2009) until I went looking for the jacket illustration to lift on Amazon (think Frederick Forsyth). It’s a splendidly plotted crime thriller overlaid with (at times, one would have to say, overladen) with some great comic writing and dialogue. Be prepared: relentless gagging is in play. For years I’ve wished there was a British Carl Hiassen, and Colin Bateman (or simply Bateman as he now advertises himself) is the closest we’ve got. And although he’s missing the underlying seriousness of Hiassen’s ecological concerns, along with the Floridan’s ability to strategically rein himself in to good effect at times, he’s pretty good at doing what he does and is very funny in his own farcical – I mean that kindly – way.
This is the second of his Mystery Man novels. The main man, who does a bit of private eye-ing on the side, runs a bookshop straight out of Black Books, but specialising in crime fiction. This allows for some nice digs and asides on the topic of crime fiction and its readers, like the Christie-like denouement (or not, as it turns out) which Bateman places mid-service in a crematorium. Mystery Man – “I’m pretty good at reading people, although better at books” – is a chronic hypochondriac self-medicator and man of excuses who is systematically and rigorously working his way down the menu at his local Starbucks; along with many other such prejudices he holds a particular grudge against personalised car number plates. The supporting cast, not least his girlfriend, Alison, all make their contribution, though I’m not sure his mother quite needed to have had an Alison-induced stroke (though, to be fair, I haven’t read the first book).
My doctor says I’m the first patient he’s had with Seasonal Affective Disorder who gets depressed by all four seasons. He says his nurse calls me Frankie Valli. […] I tried yoga once, but got tendonitis.
Undemanding he may be, but I shall be reading more in the future, I’m sure.
Lillabullero 