The Taming of the Shrew
By William Shakespeare
Bell Shakespeare Company
Directed by John Bell
Footbridge Theatre, Sydney, to July 30
Reviewed by Peter Boyle
Bell Shakespeare Company is touring Australia with a version of The Taming of the Shrew set in a Gold Coast RSL and a sci-fi Macbeth. Many theatre companies have sought to make Shakespeare's work more accessible to modern audiences, and Bell's Taming of the Shrew is one such. It is fast paced, entertaining and easy to follow while faithfully preserving the Bard's famed wit and language.
Presenting the play to a modern audience runs a risk of becoming part of the backlash against feminism, as the story is about the "taming" of a young woman, Kate (played by Essie Davis), by her rough and down-and-out husband, Petruchio (Christopher Stollery). Other modern performances have sought to overcome this, for instance, by presenting argumentation about its sexual politics at the end. Others have sought to explain Kate's "shrewishness" or make much of the attraction of opposites.
Bell's version refrains from direct comment but uses direction to bare the hypocrisy and misogyny at work in the story.
Instead of love transcending conflict in the scene where Kate is "tamed", we see her reluctantly agreeing (after days of food and sleep deprivation) with her husband that the sun is the moon and a passing man a woman, just so she can end her torment. And Kate's final soliloquy — in which she declares that she has come to realise that a woman should be her husband's slave — appears to be delivered as simply an attempt to show up her father, sister and suitors.
This is changing the story that Shakespeare wrote, and some critics were offended — the Sydney Morning Herald's Bob Evans complained that he was not convinced that Kate and Petruchio had really fallen in love — but it was a stimulating and enjoyable performance.