What happens in The Taming of the Shrew?
 The Making of The Taming of the Shrew - page one
Diederick Santer is a producer for 成人快手 Drama Series & Serials, where he produced the first three series of the hit hairdressing drama Cutting It. He has also worked as a script editor for Granada and for United Productions, where we worked on ITV series including The Last Train, Always and Everyone and the first two series of Where The Heart Is.
Here he describes the process of producing the 成人快手 ONE updating of The Taming of the Shrew.
Getting the setting right
Shakespeare is considered a great humanist, an insightful and even-handed chronicler of human life. So how do we explain him writing The Taming of the Shrew, a romantic comedy about a man who terrorises a woman into subservience and marriage?
It's a question that's challenged audiences for centuries, and it's a question Sally Wainwright (writer of ITV's hit series At 成人快手 With The Braithwaites and the BAFTA-nominated Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath) was keen to explore.
Near the beginning of the original play, the Katherine character is instructed by her father to marry. The challenge which Sally quickly identified was to find a credible present-day situation in which a woman could be told to get married. Kate Evans (the script editor) and I suggested countless ideas to Sally (eg. Katherine is an illegal immigrant who needs to marry to stay in the country; she comes from an important family who want to have descendants; she is a princess and has to marry to secure the future of her country).
To the embarrassment of both Kate and me, Sally quickly and correctly identified these ideas as utter rubbish, and then presented a rather brilliant one of her own. What if Katherine was an MP, one whom the public didn't quite 'get'? And what if she was advised by her party bosses that the public would like her better and she'd therefore go further as a politician if she were to marry?
After all, there are plenty of examples in real life of opposition leaders, Chancellors of the Exchequer, becoming more likeable to the public after having got married. So we had our setting and we had our beginning.
I'd say Sally's version is The Taming of Two Shrews. She's made Katherine and Petruchio equally spiky characters, and at times it's hard to tell who's brutalising who. The story in our version asks the universal questions, how do you let yourself love and be loved without compromising yourself? How do you share your life without losing something? It asks these questions, I think, in funny, surprising, touching, noisy, and above all entertaining ways - much like Shakespeare's original. And also, much like Shakespeare's orginal play, it doesn't answer those questions but leaves the audience to work it out for themselves.
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