Kiss Me, Kate

Introduced by Mr Anthony

There are plays about misogyny and there are misogynistic plays. Kiss Me, Kate, premiering in 1948, was something of a hybrid. 

In placing the frame narrative of a warring theatrical couple around an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, the show viewed the source material through a semi-ironic lens, with the Elizabethan marriage market and its commodification of women sent up in songs such as ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ and ‘I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua’. In ‘I Hate Men’, the female lead wittily condemns sexual double standards in a strikingly modern treatise on toxic masculinity. However, the same character is also beaten publicly by her ex-husband and, in a startling volte-face at the show’s climax, appears willing to subdue herself to his mastery. The programme for the original production of Kiss Me, Kate bore the image of a whip, tipping the musical’s title from playful suggestion to baleful command.

Book of the Week

It's World Bee Day on Thursday (see here for more info) - and appropriately enough, our book of the week is A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, recommended by Eddie Atkinson

First performed in 1958, A Taste of Honey was written by 19 year old Shelagh Delaney and adapted for film in 1961, as well as inspiring a jazz standard since recorded by the Beatles, Barbara Streisand and, inexplicably, Billy Dee Williams (a discovery that allowed me to become one of the privileged 2,000 or so people to have listened to a fairly large chunk of Lando Calrissian’s discography yet left him still only the second most musically successful actor to have played the character).

The House of Bernarda Alba: Director’s Notes

Mr Anthony

In August 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, one of Spain’s greatest writers was assassinated on the orders of fascist militia allied to Franco. For years, the details of Lorca’s murder were shrouded in mystery but, given his open allegiance to the leftist Popular Front, he quickly became, in death, a political martyr for the anti-Nationalist movement. Yet one of his assassins later bragged of having fired two bullets into the poet 'for being queer'. 

Decades later, Spain’s literary establishment, and even his own family, refused to acknowledge Lorca’s sexuality. As biographer Ian Gibson attests: 'Spain couldn’t accept that the greatest Spanish poet of all time was homosexual. Homophobia existed on both sides in the civil war and afterwards; it was a national problem.' And yet in Sonnets of a Dark Love, produced shortly before his death, Lorca writes: 'You will never understand that I love you / because you sleep in me and are asleep. / I hide you, weeping, persecuted / by a voice of penetrating steel.' The sexuality of the sentiment is clear in Spanish, in which nouns are gendered.

Book of the Week

The Ride Down Mount Morgan by Arthur Miller
Recommended by Robert Brewer

This short play by legendary playwright Miller is about Lyman Felt, a man who has lied all his life, coming face to face with his two wives at the same time, for the first time.

The play circles around Lyman, confined to a hospital bed, forced to reveal the truth to his wives. Theo - the first wife of over 20 years - stable, genuine, and the mother of Lyman’s child Bessie, and Leah - young, attractive, and restless.

Peer Gynt

Next week's junior play is Ibsen's Peer Gynt, adapted and directed by Dr Hudson, who here offers an introduction to the play, and explains some of the thinking behind his adaption.

The Norwegian poet and playwright Henrik Ibsen completed his great verse drama, Peer Gynt, in the summer of 1867. He may have been nearly forty but it’s clearly a work that reflects a young man’s fear of responsibility and it includes themes to which he would return in his famous domestic tragedies such as A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881) and Hedda Gabler (1890), especially concerning sins of the past returning to plague their inventors.