Why There’s A Wench

Smoking, bedsheets and 1940s Italy; the RSC have chosen all the things that could make Taming the sexiest play of the year. Its hard to market a morality play about misogyny and yet for years people have flocked to see Shakespeare’s Taming Of The Shrew, and this year there’s a brand new production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. What director Lucy Bailey does so well with the production is combine the analysis of what it is to be a husband or a wife with the comedy and lust of the rest of the play. When a group of shady figures decide to teach the wretched Christopher Sly a lesson, they convince him he is a lord, hand him a beautiful young boy dressed as a stunning virgin for a wife, and perform for him the tale of Baptiste’s two daughters; Katharina, the titular shrew, with more banter, violence and amorality than you can possibly imagine, and Bianca, who is surrounded by suitors who desire her, but cannot marry until her sibling is married off. So begins the quest for Katharina’s tamer, which falls to the equally boisterous and uncaring Petruchio.

The first thing to say of the production is that the set is simply spectacular. Wonderfully simple but incredibly clever, the entire play takes place on a gigantic Jacobean bed, complete with wood-paneling at the back and curtains that project the shadows of parties across the stage. Sly and his harassers are always on stage, constantly switching in hilarious farce beneath the sheets across the entire theatre, but moving around enough to leave the stage free for the performers. The show allows for enough panto to enhance the sexy and raunchy nature of some scenes without making it look like a cheap gimmick. This is the great talent of Bailey’s production of the classic, that everything is just right. There’s not too much of anything, and so when the earlier matchmaking comedy turns into the Justinian destruction of Katharina in the second half, it never feels like a massive turn. It is still funny, but there was still warmth and something unusual going on in the first half. There is a constant undertone of something sinister as well as something incredibly funny, and when Katharina launches into her famously ambiguous speech about the place of women at the end of the play, the theatre is spellbound for it could be the ultimate destruction of her as a woman, it could be a ploy she has schemed with Petruchio for money, it could be just about anything, because Bailey has not left us with a feeling that either ending is the logical one. Somehow, with a world-famous play, she has still managed to give it something of an air of not knowing.

Lisa Dillon as Katharina and David Caves as Petruchio lead a cast of inevitably talented actors who bring life to characters that could easily become stale but never have a chance to because the actors are constantly pumping them full of sauciness. Caves is disgustingly handsome and wonderfully petulant as Petruchio but maybe relies too much on good lucks and not charm to make us excuse his behaviour at times. Dillon meanwhile is beautiful, sassy and unrelenting in her portrayal of the dynamic Kate. One cannot praise the cast, set and direction of the piece enough; you need a ticket. You need one now. Its one of the RSC’s best comedies in a long time.