Toby Frow's new Shrew starts with a Bermondsey drunk clambering on stage and threatening to disrupt the evening's entertainment. Older playgoers may recall a similar tactic in a famous Michael Bogdanov Stratford production of 1978, when a heavily disguised Jonathan Pryce abused the theatre staff and started to tear down the set. The difference is that Pryce's eruption had gullible spectators rushing off to call the police, whereas in Frow's noisily rumbustious production we know that the prefatory mayhem is only a joke.
Having set up the Christopher Sly framework, Frow soon dispenses with it, giving us a relatively straightforward Shrew chiefly conspicuous for its relish for double entendres. The evening's most original feature is that Simon Paisley Day plays Petruchio less as a bumptious adventurer than as a quietly spoken gentleman who adopts sadistic wife-taming principally as a therapeutic device. It doesn't make this any more palatable, but it is given a certain rationale by Samantha Spiro's no-holds-barred Katherina, who knocks down walls with her fists and whose instinctive response to a prospective wooer is to kick him in the goolies. Both actors go at it hammer and tongs, but what I missed was any hint that they are both troubled people whose very first encounter ignites a strong sexual spark.
In short, this is a broad, knockabout Shrew that doesn't go in much for psychological depth and presents Katherina's final speech of submission without irony. But it goes down well with its audience and yields two very good supporting performances. Pearce Quigley turns Petruchio's servant, Grumio, into a faintly subversive figure who punctuates his master's obsessive references to his father's death by ostentatiously kicking a bucket. And Sarah MacRae suggests that Bianca is not just a spoilt brat, but potentially as violent a virago as her older sister. That aside, this is a conventionally jolly evening that never troubles to dig far below the play's disturbing surface.
