While it appears good sense to ask a woman director to grapple with the seemingly misogynistic Taming of the Shrew, there’s a serious snag. For as Gale Edwards remarked apropos her 1995 RSC production, any woman director ‘might as well get a loaded shotgun and put it against her temple’ because half the critics will find your effort insufficiently radical and feminist, while the other half will ‘shoot you down in flames’ because any feminist slant would be untrue to a play that is ‘meant to be about the surrender of love’. This at least lays out the challenge. The good news from Stratford is that the RSC’s latest director, Lucy Bailey, meets it so brilliantly as to be in no danger from any shotgun.
This is simply because she sees that the trick is to show Petruchio (David Caves) and Katherina (Lisa Dillon) as two vigorously sexual people up against a Padua of money-grubbing old men and of young men whose marital expectations can’t see beyond a dowry and a pretty face. The so-called ‘taming’ has therefore next to nothing to do with obedience and female submission but everything to do with a skilfully protracted foreplay between two highly energised human equals.
Any number of theses have been devoted to the role of the bed in Elizabethan drama so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to discover the entire playing area as the surface of an immense rumpled bed. Certainly a nicely cushioned surface for knockabout high jinks and fun with mysterious motions under the covers. No shortage of pillows and bolsters for the fights and flying feathers which punctuate the action.
Lucy Bailey goes with the Induction that introduces the Petruchio–Kate story as the dream of the drunkard Christopher Sly.
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