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The Taming of the Shrew

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

3 out of 5 stars

How do you tame the Shrew? ‘Merchant of Venice’ aside, this must be Shakespeare’s least updatable play. To an audience raised with the notion of gender equality, the tale of a mouthy, wealthy young woman rendered ‘comformable’ by a domineering fortune-hunter can feel as shrill and unlovable as the shrew herself, Kate.

In this version, director Robin Norton-Hale argues that Kate and Petruchio are equal. Each rings changes in the other, and Petruchio’s conquest of her is a triumph of realism and honesty.

The play is set in a contemporary market, presumably to underline the transactional nature of all marriages. More interestingly, Kate, Bianca and their strict father Baptista – he who won’t allow his younger daughter out until her unpopular sister is safely wed – are now black.

Making the conqueror white and the defeated literally ‘as brown in hue as hazelnuts’ allows the play to be read as a drama of colonialism – and it is greatly to the credit of Simon Darwen as Petruchio and Elexi Walker as Kate that this makes an awkward scenario still more uncomfortable.

Gender and race laid out among the bananas; sometimes, the production threatens to collapse under the weight of so much relevance, but you have to admire its ambition.

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