CLASSIC BECOMES A SISTER ACT
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Award-winning director Tara Notcutt was nothing but a twinkle in her mother’s eye when I was studying The Taming of the Shrew as a setwork at an all-girls high school. Brilliant English teachers who spoke with well-rounded vowels and rolling Rs guided us, but I used to find the voices of the girls reading the men’s parts in the play incongruous.
Now, three decades later, Notcutt is directing the same content with a 17-strong all-female cast and crew — and I not only enjoy watching them rehearse but laugh at their attempts to stifle their responses to fellow actors’ interpretations.
Notcutt also matriculated from an allgirls school. It is down the road from Maynardville Open-air Theatre in Wynberg, Cape Town, where she’ll present her 50th show this February.
For her, the occasion is both surreal and serendipitous. She is half the age of the theatre that has been home to Shakespearean productions for 62 years, and it’s a decade since she graduated from university, “doing something I imagined doing growing up”.
Accustomed to working behind the scenes at the Maynardville festival, she was delighted to be asked to produce a work this time. She’s the youngest director and the fifth woman to have that honour.
What influenced the casting? “Part of being an independent producer is that you’re paying for it, so you can do what you like. I put in a proposal for an allfemale Twelfth Night last year, then Geoff [Geoffrey Hyland] staged his production. The feedback was that [the organisers] liked the idea of an all-female company and that it was a good time to be doing this sort of thing, because of the themes tackled in this particular play,” says Notcutt.
Of the team, all are Maynardville newbies except the vocal coach, who has worked twice before at the venue, and Lynita Crofford, who plays Baptista and performed in the 1982 production of The Taming of the Shrew.
What can audiences expect from this portrayal of the battle of the sexes that looks at gender, marriage and family as the headstrong Kate copes with Petruchio’s attempts to woo and win her? Notcutt says she “wanted to change it up and give
Cape Town audiences something they don’t always see” while giving the creative team a platform to demonstrate their skills and attract more work in the future.
Though the play is a dark comedy, Notcutt likes to call it a comedy horror.
“You can expect a Taming quite unlike other people tackle it. I’ve taken a particular stance with an all-female team, being the age that I am, seeing the play in a certain way, and bringing out that which is close to my heart.”
The structure of patriarchy is one aspect. “A play like this has a lot of men in it. There are only two female parts [Kate and Bianca], but the women are very much alone and outside the men’s world,” says Notcutt.
“We’re looking at moments where people know something’s not quite right, but nobody who has the freedom to say something about it does anything about it — the accountability of men to other men. It’s been a balancing act between what is in the play and creating characters who are real.”