The Shrew is often more problematic than any of Shakespeare’s more usually designated “problem plays”. It is, simply, all but impossible to portray Katherina’s reconciliation to Petruchio for a modern audience without taking a strong line on the misogyny that is now perceived to run through the play. Whether Petruchio’s stratagems and ploys are outright abuse intended to subjugate Kate, or whether she is interpreted as being an aware, independent woman who ultimately chooses to accept him (and, in some versions, is herself the tamer), it is a given that Petruchio is to a great extent a bastard and far more abusive than Kate ever has been. How, in the 21st century, can we restore it as a love story? Amazingly, Lucy Bailey almost entirely nails it.
    
She and designer Ruth Sutcliffe turn the entire RST stage into one huge bed, arguing that various bed-centred events and activities are what the whole play is about. This may also explain why a lot of the physical activity in the earlier acts tends towards the jumping-about-and-writhing shade of the spectrum. Bailey not only preserves the Induction to the play (in which tinker Christopher Sly is taken in a drunken stupor and tricked into believing himself a lord, who then watches the play proper as a presentation before him), but integrates it throughout the entire evening. Nick Holder’s fat, sweaty Sly is either lying in one corner of the stage-bed watching the action or cropping up at unexpected moments in search of his stolen underpants.
    
Above all, Lisa Dillon (seldom seen without cigarette and hip-flask) and David Caves as Kate and Petruchio visibly feel a spark at first meeting; their subsequent relationship may be a contest as to which can be the stroppiest, but it is an implicitly, subconsciously consensual one. When Dillon’s Kate makes her climactic speech of submission (“…place your hands below your husband’s foot”), she is sincere but not broken… in token of which, the hat she has been wearing earlier in the scene is Petruchio’s trilby. I must admit to finding both these central performances irritatingly mannered (though not as irksome as Simon Gregor’s accent as Petruchio’s servant Grumio, which tries to mimic Caves’ Northern Irish and emerges as Belfast via Bratislava), but these reservations pale in the face of so successful a staging of what had hitherto always seemed a reactionary interpretation. This can still be a more or less straightforward romantic comedy.

Written for the Financial Times.