THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
Shakespeare's Globe, London SE1
Opened 3 June, 2016
***

The Taming Of The Shrew, like The Merchant Of Venice, has its problems for modern viewers amplified when staged at Shakespeare’s Globe. Does a director give in to the audience’s determined eagerness for comedy, or rather take them on at the risk of losing them with a serious treatment of the issues of sexism and oppression?

Caroline Byrne sets out to tread a canny and clever line. She takes the Irish Easter Rising as her inspiration (just after its centenary), and in particular the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic’s commitment to equal rights as between men and women. The framing device of the play proper, involving the tinker Christopher Sly, is here replaced by a ballad written by Morna Regan, sung by the contemporary cast before and after morphing into Irishfolk of a century ago.

It’s a brilliant concept, marred by only one slight problem: I, as an Irishman with a lifetime’s experience of watching and interpreting stage productions closely, didn’t get a whiff of it. The nationality and the period (roughly), yes, but any relationship to that moment of idealism, much less a sense of the ballad acting as a bridge between that world and this... nope, sorry. So how much sense it’s going to make to a lay viewer is anybody’s guess.

What I did see was an energetic and committed performance as Kate by Aoife Duffin (especially as she is a short-notice replacement), never being genuinely “reformed” by Edward MacLiam’s bellowing, frankly unstable Petruchio, but sullenly persuaded to humour him as the only way forward. Hardly, in itself, a counsel either of resolve or even hope. The comedy, meanwhile, is supplied in the subplot involving Kate’s more conspicuously marriageable sister, with Aaron Heffernan as disguised suitor Lucentio and the ever-delightful Imogen Doel cross-cast as his servant Tranio, who in turn is disguised as Lucentio. (It all makes sense, at least for Shakespearean comedy values of “sense”.)

Reading up on the production afterwards has made me much more impressed by it. But one of the core points about a stage show is that if you need to read up to understand it, then it’s not doing the job itself.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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