The Taming of the Shrew
Old VicTheatre Winter 2007

Edward Hall's all-male production of The Shrew is totally delightful through its first half, and then makes what is clearly a conscious and deliberate decision to go sour in the second half. The result is always interesting, but not always as much fun as you'd like it to be.

Director Hall plays the opening scenes for bright and bouncy comedy. All the characters are a little larger-than-life, all the action has a half-choreographed zing to it, all the costumes are brightly coloured - and the whole thing takes on some of the feel of an animated cartoon.

It's exactly right for the play, particularly the silly subplot, and creates a thoroughly happy mood.

Even more than in the Twelfth Night that plays with it in rep, the all-male casting works beautifully. Both Simon Scardifield as Kate and Jon Trenchard as Bianca are quickly accepted as women characters, without any hint of camp or drag acting. And the androgynous quality actually helps us focus on the characters and their emotions, without the distraction of gender.

And so, for all its lightness, the play can carry some emotional weight. In this vaguely modern dress design, Scardifield's Kate is the rebellious punk-rocker daughter and Bianca the daddy's-girl princess, and their interplay, and particularly Kate's unhappiness at the role she's stuck herself into, ring true.

She clearly falls for Dugald Bruce-Lockhart's Petruchio because he's the first guy ever to treat her with anything remotely resembling respect and kindness, and some of the warm comic fun comes from her immediate softening.

He too proves a little more complex than he first seems, a bit of a football yob who is also quite a charmer and the smartest and fastest-thinking person onstage.

And then, at exactly the moment after their wedding when Petruchio says 'She is my goods, my chattel...', his charm disappears and Petruchio becomes - or reveals himself as - the ugliest sort of misogynist and wife-abuser.

Yes, the lines are all there in the text, though most modern productions choose to play them as a process of freeing Kate from the pattern of shrewishness and showing her how to be herself.

But Edward Hall will have none of that. The second half of the play is devoted to the systematic and unambiguous breaking of Kate's spirit through cruelty and nastiness - Petruchio even takes on the accent of one of the nastier characters out of The Sopranos - until her final big speech ('Thy husband is thy lord....') is the half-dead recitation of the broken and brainwashed.

In short, the second act in this production isn't much fun.

It's fascinating in a slightly macabre way, especially for those who know the play and need reminding that at least something of that element is there in the words on the page. But it is likely to be a shock and something of a comedown for anyone enjoying the comedy of the first act.

Bruce-Lockhart and especially Scardifield are first-rate, and the supporting cast all have fun with their somewhat easier all-comic roles, with Tony Bell's Tranio standing out with the ease and authority of the born comic actor.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Taming of the Shrew - Old Vic 2007