Reviews West End & Central Published 7 July 2012

The Taming of the Shrew

Globe Theatre ⋄ 23rd June - 13th October 2012

It’s all in the game.

Carmel Doohan

For feminists The Taming of the Shrew can be read as a tragedy as much as a comedy, but in Toby Frow’s new production for the Globe it is mainly played for laughs –  many of which it gets.

There are cod-pieces, bare bottoms and custard pies; the humour is never laboured but feels fresh and entertaining, particularly when delivered by a droll Pearce Quigley playing Grumia with a sardonic northern wit and getting a giggle with every line.

The induction scene- a framing device often seen as a way for Shakespeare to distance himself from the attitudes espoused in the play – is also brilliantly done: a very contemporary football hooligan staggers onto the stage and starts to urinate on the audience. When a believably stunned, yet health and safety conscious stage manager steps up to announce that the show will have to be cancelled, the cast bravely agree to incorporate the drunkard into the show. The audience, impressed and delighted, cheer them on every step of the way.

In Frow’s production, Katherina and Petruchio are used as vehicles for satire rather than as fully rounded characters. Played with articulate charm by Simon Paisley Day, Petruchio’s exaggerated and torturous taming methods are clearly meant to expose gender relations to the audience and not be taken literally. By caricaturing the lovers, Frow side-steps the problematic and abusive aspect of their relationship, but this emphasis on the Carry On rather than the psychological, undermines the play’s sexual tensions. Samantha Spiro’s shrew is rambunctious and energetic but to the point of being one-dimensional. 

All the Machiavellian trickery is out in the open. The mutable nature of identity is explored, as is the norm in Shakespeare, with everyone dressing up and swapping roles to get what they want, but here it has added resonance – the characters are finding ways to move within a highly structured and rigid society; as their identities become more fluid, the fixed and binary positions offered to women – cursed shrew or innocent maiden – are overturned and made laughable. The play, for all its comedic exaggeration, is insightful about social conventions and rewards  those most adept at acknowledging and then subverting them. Bianca – played with wit and style by Sarah MacRae – wonderfully demonstrates the benefits that an ability to act and adapt can bring a woman.

The received wisdom of male rationality and female irrationality is also turned on its head – Katherina’s moment of supposed capitulation is when she recognises and accepts her husbands irrationality along with her own, telling him:

Then, God be bless’d, it is the blessed sun/But sun it is not, when you say it is not/ And the moon changes even as your mind./What you will have it named, even that it is;/And so it shall be so for Katherina.

There is a sense that a spell has been broken. Whereas before there was a caricature on stage, there is now a woman. Spiro skilfully allows Katherina to awake: we can see her and now she too can suddenly see and interact with the world. It is this flexibility inherent in both identity and what passes for reality that her speech at the end proclaims. Delivered here without irony, the telling lines, “Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare/ that seeming to be most what we indeed least are,” are clearly emphasised. Spiro lets Katherina’s transformative late blossoming transform the play itself, from a bawdy romp to a powerful celebration of a woman’s ability to play the game and win.

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Carmel Doohan

Carmel is an arts journalist and writer who lives in Hackney, London.

The Taming of the Shrew Show Info


Directed by Toby Frow

Cast includes Samantha Spiro, Simon Paisley Day, Michael Bertenshaw, Pearce Quigley, Joseph Timms, Helen Weir, Sarah MacRae, Pip Donaghy

Link http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

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