Theatre review: The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare's Globe)

There's only really two things wrong with The Taming of the Shrew: One of them is half the plot, and the other is the other half. In Padua, the beautiful Bianca (Sophie Mercell) has many suitors, including the wealthy locals Gremio (Nigel Barrett) and Hortensio (Lizzie Hopley,) and recently-arrived Lucentio (Yasmin Taheri.) They compete for Bianca's hand in a needlessly convoluted scheme involving assuming fake identities, swapping around real identities, and a steadfast refusal to say a single funny line. The other storyline gives the play its title, as Bianca is not allowed to get married until her older sister Katherina (Thalissa Teixeira) does, and as she's considered a difficult woman, it seems she never will. So Hortensio recruits his mercenary friend Petruchio (Andrew Leung) to marry Katherina (it's not like she has any say in the matter) and once that's done he proceeds to bend her to his will through a sustained campaign of gaslighting and literal torture as defined by the UN.

The play's raging misogyny is what it's best known for now, and makes it hard to watch in anything like the spirit that's intended. On the other hand it can offer up the only reason for revisiting the play, as different directors have come up with many interesting twists on how to either expose or neutralise its unpleasantness.

As far as I can make out Jude Christian's approach seems to be to throw so many weird, confusing and contradictory conceits at the play that the audience might not notice how bloody awful it is. The main focus of Rosie Elnile's design seems to be that this is an enormous crèche, in which oversized toddlers are running riot: The stage is dominated by a giant teddy bear, some of the cast wear babygrows, and Barrett's Christopher Sly spends much of the show locked up in a playpen (which looked like it was completely blocking the view from the audience left side of the stage.)

There's also a lot of use of dolls and puppets, including grotesque giant puppet faces that take up the entire chests of Gremio and Hortensio. Some characters are always played by puppets, some only in certain scenes, for reasons which were not apparent to me. But the toddler conceit is contradicted constantly, including by keeping the Christopher Sly framework, which is also given an added element of Teixeira being plucked out of the groundlings to play the title role. Jamie-Rose Monk's Vincentio spends the entire show sitting at the back filling in a sudoku book, so I thought she was a babysitter, but after the interval she starts to act as a particularly aggressive stage manager, angrily demanding the cast get on with their scenes, and at one point taking out a gun to force them to continue the distressing scenes. If she is a babysitter, she's a pretty bad one.

There's something of a through-line from Teixeira being playfully dropped into the action, to eventually being forced at gunpoint to conclude her character's cycle of abuse and brainwashing, that suggests the overall effect was meant to be of the actors, and by extension the audience, being trapped in a comedy that turns into a surreal nightmare. But of course that comedy element is never strong - the utter weirdness of the situation does get some laughs, but I've got to applaud tonight's audience for giving one of Shakespeare's umpteen "why yes I am his father, at least that's what my wife tells me, ho ho ho" lines the response it deserves:

Elsewhere Corin Buckeridge's music actively drowns out some of the dialogue, which doesn't exactly dispel the notion that we're being distracted by any means necessary from what's actually in the script.

There are moments that stand out: Eloise Secker's Grumio is taped up with makeshift padding to take beatings from Petruchio, and the way the servant's arc gets darker and more pitiful throughout the evening feels like the effect the whole production is aiming for and not quite hitting. Simon Startin's Baptista (who has Mickey Mouse hands and feet for, I assume, reasons) is hit after the wedding by the realisation that he's essentially sold off his daughter to the first maniac who'll have her, and that melancholy actually seems to stay with him for the rest of the play. John Cummins' Biondello is a pretty straightforward Shakespearean clown figure who actually works well in the context.

Best of all is the first meeting between Katharina and Petruchio, successfully balancing the fun verbal sparring with the underlying threat as Teixeira's confidence is undermined by the understanding that Leung's sinister imp could be about to have complete legal power over her. But for me the production as a whole remained a big misfire, the brand of craziness of the staging never connecting with the one in the text, and so seeming like an elaborate distraction technique that, in the end, neither makes the comedy any funnier, nor makes the ending any less horrific.

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 26th of October at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz and Helen Murray.