On the 22nd of May, I went with the school to the Royal Shakespeare theatre, in Stratford upon Avon; to see the Matinee performance of Williams Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’. The play contained a cast of seven main characters. There was a father in the play called Baptista who had two daughters which were called Katherine and Bianca. Bianca was a very beautiful young lady who was sweet and fare but some times could be a bit childish and immature. Katherine or Kate on the other hand was a wild and fearsome woman who tried everything in her power to make her angel sisters’ life a misery. There were many men who wished to marry Bianca such as Hortensio and Gremio. A man who also loved and wished to cart Bianca was Lucentio who disguised himself as a school teacher just to get close to her.
The general plot of the play was that Baptista would not let his youngest daughter Bianca marry anyone before there was a husband for his eldest daughter Kate. Hortensio meet his friend Petruchio in the street and sneakily talked him into marrying Kate so that Bianca could meet him, and he could try to make her fall in love with him and marry him. Petruchio who finds out how wealthy Kate was accepted the offer and married her for her money, but fell in love with her and tamed her.
The play took place on an open stage, with a large cyclorama screen that was placed at the back which was lit to give the effects of water, clouds and rain clouds. There were no curtains, and there was a small amount of floor space between the stage and the raised auditorium. Instead of the orchestra playing at the front it was raised stage right to the level of the boxes. There were many different size doors some were raised higher than others but were manly placed centre stage and up stage it was sort of a Rostrum but with doors. I think this was not only done to show the different rooms or to give the impression of peoples homes but maybe to also give the effect of different levels. The doors stayed on the stage for most of the play.
There was a ladder which took the actors on to railings which made a sort of raised platform this was used to enter and exit to a wing upstairs like when Kate was in Petruchios house for the first time and they climbed the ladder and used the platform as a sort of upstairs where the bedroom was supposed to be. This was raised for most of the performance and only lowered when the scene was in Petruchios’ house. Another way the actors entered and exited the stage was by a stage rake that was up stage centre and turned into the left wing nearly everyone used it and it was the main exit from the stage. There was also a Trap door that was used during the play I think only once by one of Petruchios servants when he was coming in to sort out the house for the arrival of Petruchio and his new wife.
There were only a few scene changes throughout the play but most of the time to change the scene the stage was just strikd. The biggest scene change was when the scene changed from the street to petruchios’s house were the railings and the flying scenery of inside a house was lowered and all the doors on the floor were taken off in a blackout. The other main scene change was during the interval when the scene changed to a park; the cyclorama changed from reflected water to a summer day and a swing was lowered to centre stage.
Sound was also used to display the emotions in each scene. The type of sound was mainly special effects for things like thunder and birds tweeting in the park scene. The orchestra also contributed to the sound before and during the play, it was nothing too evident, which didn’t really give much of an impact which is a good thing. During the play the stage was lit using foot lights and floodlights, which made it quite bright. The only times when the scene was not light was either when the effect of night was wanted or in Petrushios’ when him and Kate arrived for the first time to do this all that was done was that the lights were dimmed lights where dim. Maybe this was because the director wanted to show the difference between the light house that Kate had grown up in and the dark house she was now forced to live in.
There was a few times in which light effects were used, for example when there was three blackouts one after the other to show the hours gone past when Petruchio said that he controlled the time. The best use of light effects was the storm outside Petruchios’ house, which was very effective, and also an amazing contrast compared to the scene with Bianca in the park, which had a completely different mood that was well conveyed by the lighting used in both scenes. The play wouldn’t have been as good if only the house lights were used.
