All the world’s a bed

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.