Of the jacket photo, she explains, “I had my hair dyed the day before so it would really hurt people’s eyes.”
Much has been made in the press of the revelation that, celebrating the completion of her first novel, Niffenegger then changed her hair colour from brown to a shade that matched her female protagonist’s. “I was just going through withdrawal and I woke up one morning and said, ‘Oh, I’ll have red hair for a while’,” she says.The transformation helped contribute to the lore surrounding this year’s Cinderella publishing story, a tale complete with a prince and with sales fuelled by fairy godparents – in the form of a certain celebrity couple. “When it’s first colored it’s like this radioactive magenta,” says the author while reclining on a sofa at Bookman’s Alley, a rare-book shop that serves as a location in her Chicago-set novel. Audrey Niffenegger’s hair doesn’t glow as red as it does on the jacket of her much-acclaimed debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife In person it’s actually a pale, lovely shade of orange.
When, in The Tamer Tamed, the women let rip in an ecstatic clog-clattering, pot-banging dance, their rebellious joy is so infectious that you’d have to be neuter not to want to join in To 6 March (0870 890 1110). Fletcher’s play is responding to the coarse conventional idea of Shakespeare’s Shrew, not the humane interpretation Doran offers here, so there’s a thought-provoking discontinuity in this double bill. But the portrayal also has psychological depth, admirably hinting at the troubled sensitive man who needs to be rescued from his own defensively protracted and now not-so-convinced laddishness.Though the subplot is a bit tiresome, there’s not a weak link in this extraordinarily strong and characterful company. Frankie Howerd himself would have envied the exquisite timing of the routine where this Petruchio, appealing for sympathy to the audience, practises chronic, stalls-drenching coughs to use in his sickbed stunt. Jasper Britton looks as though he’s been hit by a convoy of tanks when she calls his bluff of pretending to be ill by having him locked up as a plague victim.His is a brilliantly funny performance. With shades of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the women barricade themselves away and join forces in a sex strike.Alexandra Gilbreath’s witty, mettlesome beauty Maria is aglow with militant purpose. Her tactic is aversion therapy, putting Petruchio through a course of humiliations similar to those he visited on her predecessor.
She wants a fully companionate marriage, based on due equality and mutual respect. To force Petruchio into submission, she needs to give him a fierce taste of his own medicine. The mild-seeming Maria is his new bride and you sense that this is a love-match. But almost 20 years separate the writing of the two plays and Maria has higher expectations of a partner than Kate. Kate, it appears, died young, after a marriage evidently as tempestuous as the courtship. Reeking of early 17th-century London (Padua conveniently forgotten), this city comedy catches up with Petruchio just as he is tying the knot for the second time. Joining his superlative account of The Shrew at the Queen’s Theatre (where the two productions will play in tandem), Gregory Doran’s uproarious RSC revival of John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed blasts the dust of neglect off this spirited 1611 riposte to the supposed chauvinism of Shakespeare’s original drama.
It’s a fluent, shrewd, robustly comic “sequel” that places the boot firmly on the other foot.
From the back-stage bickering of Kiss Me Kate to the high-school hissy-fits of Ten Things I Hate About You, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has inspired many a spin-off. But the earliest and, in many respects, the boldest of these is the least well known That is, until now. Some of the details are choice enough to survive Jayanti’s ineptitude, like the doleful IBM team who complain that Mama Kasparov tried to psyche them out by “clapping sarcastically.”The Human Stain (18) The integrity of the spoof has plummeted since Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. But the director, David Zucker, has put enough donkeywork into the Airplane and Naked Gun series to know that he’s scraping the barrel with gags about dog excrement and the sexual abuse of children by the clergy.. These days recognition has taken the place of invention; it’s enough for the Scary Movie trilogy to make references to other films without deploying any resourcefulness in its parodies.The cast give their all to the coarse routines and violent pratfalls. But as he begins to suspect that human intervention is unfairly prejudicing this face-off between the head and the hard-drive, the paranoia eats into him; footage from the tournament shows him obsessively holding his face as though worried it might fall off at any moment.