Shakespeare's play is like a problem in constant need of solution. Five years ago, Gregory Doran suggested that Petruchio was a damaged wreck rescued by a benevolently therapeutic Kate. Conall Morrison's version heightens the play's farcical cruelty, but, while it is intellectually consistent, I miss its predecessor's unexpected humanity.
Morrison's point is clear: the play is an ugly male fantasy. Retaining the Induction, he transforms Christopher Sly from a drunken Warwickshire beggar into an urban yob. Picked up in the gutter by a hired lady, he is bamboozled into believing he is a toff and entertained by a cry of players who descend from a travelling truck. What they offer him is a hectic, wham-bam, commedia-influenced version of The Shrew which fulfils his wildest, sadistic dreams.
Morrison is not the first to give the play an explicatory context; but in so doing deprives it of charm. In playing Sly and Petruchio, Stephen Boxer makes the latter simply a more upmarket, verse-speaking version of the former. Everything about this Petruchio is brutal, from the way he slams his servant's head against a door to his wedding, sporting antler's horns and bloodied bridal gown.
The interpretation has a limiting effect on Michelle Gomez's Kate. Gomez, in the early scenes, is all fire and whipcracking energy. But the first confrontation with Petruchio is played purely as barbaric spectacle. She counters his sexual manoeuvres with head-butts, eye-gouging and crotch-kicking. Later Gomez endures Petruchio's physical and psychological torture with stoicism and delivers the famous speech of submission with a steely, implacable calm. There is an inevitable pay-off as the production returns to the initial framing-device. But, although the final gesture is one of female revenge, Gomez is given too little chance to display the sardonic wit of which we know she is capable.
The production is full of good, liberal intentions. It is refreshing to see the company allowed to indulge their talent for physical comedy: Patrick Moy and Amara Karan as a rutting Lucentio and Bianca seize the moment and William Beck makes a commendably masochistic Grumio. But, while Morrison treats the play as a relentless critique of masculine values, he starves us of redemption.
Until September 25.
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