Authors Electric

When did you last see a production of The Taming of the Shrew ? Not recently, I’ll bet. A comedy whose title alone always made it tricky to negotiate has arguably no place at all in today’s postfeminist world. If so, we are the poorer for it. Shakespeare is Shakespeare after all, and to consign any work of his to oblivion is a huge loss. Which is why I’m delighted that the play forms part of the RSC’S current season and have lost no time in seeing it. Admiring the company’s courage in tackling something so politically incorrect, I wondered how they’d get round the problem. Easy: reverse the roles. Make Italy a collection of cities ruled by matriarchs, with Petruchia wooing Baptista’s sullen son Katherine (I guess Katherino just doesn’t work), while Grumia and Hortensia vie with each other over the hand of Katherine’s charming younger brother, Bianco. As an ironic take on the patriarchy, it works brilliantly. More, by seeing so many powerful women on stage...

Happy New Year all! Right, I’ll kick off 2019 with an admission: until two weeks ago, I had never read A Christmas Carol . Yup, you read that right. Charles Dickens’s much-loved (and pleasingly short) fable about mean old Scrooge being ‘woke’ (right up there with modern idioms, that’s me) and swapping his miserliness for kindness and generosity… to be honest, I knew the story so well I really thought I had read it. But in preparation for a family visit to David Edgar’s adaptation of the book for the Royal Shakespeare Company , I thought I’d take up the original – and boy, am I glad I did. Because if I hadn’t, I might really have thought that what we saw in Stratford was the Real McScrooge. Or rather, I’d have suspected some of the odder scenes as being fashionably updated, but not known exactly where Dickens ended and his adaptor began. The more skilled the adaptor – and Edgar is very skilled – the more the original writer’s essence is blurred, twisted and, frankly...

The seductive lure of the theatre...it’s been calling to me ever since I can remember. I used to round up the local kids for ‘shows’ at the end of the cul-de-sac and spent hours threading raffia onto string to make grass skirts for hula-hula dancers, cutting up acres of crepe paper, writing scripts. I wanted to be an opera singer, never mind that I couldn’t produce a single squeak in my audition for the school choir. A ballet dancer, at 5’9”. An actor. I did join the local AmDram group and was offered an audition for the National Youth theatre on the strength of something (I’ve forgotten what) I played – but my ‘A’ levels were coming up and I took the straight and narrow way. I’m glad. I now know that I couldn’t have sustained the life of an actor; it’s simply too tough.           In more recent years, still under the old spell of glamour and greasepaint, I went for writing rather than performing. I submitted a script for Saturday Sit...