A voice over introduces the play as a musical and from there starts the clever interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew by the Fourth Wall Production of The American College highlighting how women constantly struggle to prove their mettle in the male-chauvinistic society.
The 80-minute play opens with a street vendor singing in melancholy and looking for the dawn of a new day followed by a dance sequence. Finally a butcher makes an entry and forcefully snatches her products introducing Padua, a capitalist male chauvinist town, where men think they can do anything with money.
The next scene shifts to a group of Nigerians again singing about sufferings of women and praying for their deliverance. After the musical introduction, the actual Shakespearean play starts exposing Katherina, “the shrew” and daughter of Baptista, a rich man. She is, presumably, detested in this world for her outspokenness. Her sister Bianca knows how to win the world with feminine foibles. Bianca is wooed by many suitors but Baptista declares that he will not give away Bianca in marriage to any one until Katherina gets married. Petruchio, a rich young man with a devil-may-care attitude takes up the challenge and “tames” the “shrew”.
The performance ends with a Tamil street play highlighting how gender inequality plagues the society. “It is a deliberate distortion of Shakespeare's text in order to contemporize the titular issue. The Fourth Wall theatre chose the earliest theory of drama; the Song and Dance Theory to start with. After engaging the audience, we moved towards judicial theory and finally made use of the street play by the members of Madurai Seeds NGO as a denouement,” says N. Elango, director of the play.
The idea to stage this play struck Elango when he was teaching poet Subramania Bharathi’s ‘Panchali Sabatham’ to a group of students. Bharathi uses an expression ‘Pettai pulambal’ to describe how Pandavas stood mute spectators ruing their misfortune when Draupadi was stripped by her adversaries. “Immediately, my students questioned how Bharathi, known as one who fought for the cause of women, can categorise women as weaker sex. Bharathi too lived in a male chauvinistic society much like Shakespeare. The Elizabethan bard found an interesting theme of how a girl of free will is tamed by a man, thus catering to a popular appetite. We just took that line and reread the whole play. What we have tried here is a revisionist cult approach to Shakespeare. We redid the entire script and whenever a discussion comes we have taken up other forms of performing arts,” he says.
The ambience of the open air theatre helped in the performance. The lightings by Kiruba Johnson and C.P. Rajiv deserve appreciation. Josiah Immanuel’s music captivated the audience. The unconventional approach to the universal issues of love, marriage and gender inequality was well received.
