BWW Reviews: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, New Wimbledon Studio Theatre, May 27 2015

The clue, of course, is in the title.

The Taming of the Shrew (continuing at New Wimbledon Studio Theatre until June 20) sees a human being broken the way one might break an overly boisterous colt - through pain and reward. There's quite a lot of low level violence too, somewhat reminiscent of The Three Stooges (an act I would have been happy to leave unremembered). And there's a clunky framing device (one of Shakespeare's less attractive habits) with a pissed-up punter heckling unnecesarily before we've even got started.

But, once you get past that stuff (and some of it is unavoidable - "Taming" is as charmless as "Dream" is charming) this Arrows and Traps production gets a lot right, principally its gender-flip that makes women men and men women.

That ruse certainly takes the edge off the - let's be honest - torture scenes when Petruchia (Geddit?) denies meat and sleep to Kajetano the better to break his will and demonstrate how appallingly he treats others. Elizabeth Appleby plays it as a super-confident sexy woman, but not a dominatrix, and Alexander McMorran always stays just the right side of appearing to enjoy the attention - there's no fetishism at work here, just the play's original text working slightly differently with the jackboot on the other foot.

Kate's famous final speech is much less troublesome when spoken by a man in love and not a woman recovering from being broken by a man's will. McMorran gives it full value too, rolling the poetry around the theatre, allowing the listener to veer a little away from its message of subservience and enjoy the wonderful sounds.

The play is at its best with Petruchia and Kajetano, rather than dragging out its secondary plots with Bianco and Lucentia and all those disguises. I'm not sure that director Ross McGregor was right to throw in a few songs too as, pleasant though they are, events, already delayed by the yobbish Sly, slow down even further, when we're really itching to get back to the verbal and physical jousting of the principals.

If you know the play, you'll get plenty from this innovative production - but if you don't, you might wonder why Shakespeare didn't ditch the teaching, the wooing and the dressing up and give his leading couple a spin-off TV series of their own (okay 400 years too soon, I know). Now that's something I'd like to see!

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