OTD in early British television: 22 April 1939
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Saturday 22 April 1939 saw the first performance of Dallas Bower’s production of Katharine and Petruchio, a radically shortened ‘acting version’ of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that had originally been prepared in the late 18th century for David Garrick.
By this point, Bower had mounted in the AP studio his successful modern-dress production of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar and his problem-plagued version of The Tempest, and Katharine and Petruchio was the final Shakespeare to be offered by television before the imminent war shut down the service on 1 September.
His cast was packed with actors who already had extensive television experience: Margaretta Scott as Katharine, Austin Trevor as Petruchio, and Alan Wheatley as Hortensio, while Vera Lindsay, a Shakespearian specialist from the Old Vic, took the part of Bianca.
Of the few remaining traces of the production, including the single still above, perhaps the most notable is the Radio Times credit, ‘Costumes by Elizabeth Haffenden’, since this appears to one of a few separate acknowledgements for costume design on any pre-war television drama.
In 1939 Haffenden was embarking on an illustrious career which would embrace most of the Gainsborough Studio melodramas of the 1940s as well as Oscars for best costume design on Ben Hur (1959) and A Man for all Seasons (1966). Her involvement in Katharine and Petruchio suggests that visual excess was perhaps more important to this production than it was to many others made with tight budget constraints and limited screen resolution.
Yet there is no credit for in-house designer Malcolm Baker-Smith, who according to one review, created ‘a charming Italian setting’, which complemented the ‘beautiful’ costumes. This is enough to suggest that the production can be seen, along with Stephen Thomas’ television productions of English ballad operas, as an element of the Georgian revival of the 1930s, when, as Alexandra Harris has outlined in her book Romantic Moderns, many aspects of the literary and visual styles of the eighteenth century were being recovered and celebrated by writers and artists of the moment.
Also, in early April 1939, a fortnight or so before Katharine and Petruchio, new productions of The Taming of the Shrew opened both in London and at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. At the Old Vic, Tyrone Guthrie produced a pantomimic Shrew, while in Stratford Komisarjevsky staged a spectacular, visually dazzling production with Alec Clunes and Vivienne Bennett.
Bower’s choice of Garrick’s text may have been a typically competitive response to this pair of high-profile productions. And how better to do that than to turn ‘a riotous comedy’ into what the Times reviewer of Katharine and Petruchio described as ‘a polite entertainment’ – Shakespeare ‘pruned and tidied up’? Speculation perhaps, but a further indication of how television Shakespeare was, like so much else, entwined with the wider cultural scene of the moment.
Leave a Reply