成人快手

The writng of The Taming of the Shrew - page two

Sally talks us through some of the characters in The Taming of the Shrew.

Petruchio
I struggled a long time to get Petruchio right. Petruchio is a complete oddball in the original. You don't really understand why he's doing what he's doing - there's many interpretations.

I went through a phase of wondering if he should be a modern British artist, because he's somebody who seems to live outside the conventional rules of society, but that came with too much artworld baggage that I didn't need.

It finally clicked for me when I saw the documentary about the Fulfords on Channel Four. They're aristocracy, or landed gentry, they own a huge pile in Devonshire, and they're a very old family that has had money in the past, but now are absolutely poverty-stricken. They've got nothing except this huge house, these incredibly posh very English people who've lost everything and have no real direction in life.

So that's where the idea for Petruchio came about. He is genuinely a gentleman, but he's a bit of a nomad. He's got nowhere to go, he's got nothing to do, but he does really need to get some money, and then as with Petruchio in the original he just happens to fall in love with this woman who seemed to be a good idea to marry.

I love the idea that Petruchio turns up at his wedding dressed like a monkey's arse, I think that's brilliant. I know in the original it's something to do with the fact that he's trying to humiliate [Kate], he's trying to bring her down a peg or two. But that was something I could never quite make consistent sense of.

So one of the things I tried to do with Petruchio was, rather than give him a big game plan which he appears to have in the original, [instead] he's actually moving from moment to moment. He functions about five minutes ahead all the time.

He doesn't have some big gameplan to humiliate Kate at the wedding, [instead] it's about the fact that he has got this dark secret, and genuinely doesn't want to hide things from her. He's trying to be honest with her, but as usual it comes out in a way that seems entirely misguided, and inappropriate, and slightly bonkers. And I just thought it was funny!

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Bianca
I wanted to make Bianca as much of a player in her own way as Katherine. One of the [important] things in the [original] play is the huge differences between them. Bianca's very attractive, everybody's after her, everybody wants to marry her, [in contrast] to Katherine.

A big obvious contrast to somebody who's very clever, like Katherine, is somebody who makes their living by being very beautiful. So I decided to make her a massive, multi-millionaire model, and obviously that whole [glamorous] world was attached to that.

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Mrs Minola
I didn't want to [have a] Mr Minola [as in the original]. I wanted to make a big thing of getting away from him being the person who sets the whole story off by setting out this ridiculous declaration.

I also wanted to suggest a bit of family background, through the fact that Bianca and Mrs Minola have a lot in common, which is I assume why they cast Twiggy. So even in her own family Kate is an outsider.

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