It's rare to see The Taming of the Shrew performed without any shade of irony. Directors either include the framing device of the tinker's dream, which has the effect of placing the action within giant quotation marks; or else Katherine's final speech about fealty to one's husband is undercut with such knowing insincerity that the inverted commas are apparent anyway. Pete Meakin allows the play to speak for itself, however unpalatable the things it has to say. Christopher Sly is dispensed with and the gender imbalance explained by transposition to the Victorian era, in which a wife's status as goods and chattels was not a matter for debate but a statement of fact.
Patrick Connellan's handsome, airy design shows the characters disembarking in the atrium of a fine, Italian station; but though most arrive by the new-fangled railway, Sean O'Callaghan's rough, Irish-accented Petruchio seems to have just finished building it, rough-handling his bride up the aisle in a navvy's jacket with a pickaxe over his shoulder. The only consolation for Lizzie Winkler's subdued Katherine is that her husband's treatment of the servants is even worse; a point emphasised by Meakins' decision to conflate Petruchio's household retinue into a single boy (an eye-catching performance from youth theatre member Frank Micklethwaite) who suffers a brutal, Dickensian beating.
O'Callaghan has an unsettling ability to make you feel complicit; settling down on the lip of the stage for his discourse about "killing a wife with kindness" as if opening things up to the floor for questions. Winkler makes her final exit with the winnings from her husband's wager stuffed in her mouth. The look of scorn on the face of Perdita Avery's Bianca is difficult to read, but it suggests that suffragism cannot come quickly enough.