The Taming of the Shrew; The Merchant of Venice
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
While the RSC’s Histories sequence is rightly grabbing critical and popular acclaim in London, what’s left for visitors to Stratford over the summer? To The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice will shortly be added a revised revival of Gregory Doran’s Midsummer Night’s Dream from 2005, followed by Hamlet with David Tennant in August and Love’s Labour’s Lost in October. All this in the temporary Courtyard Theatre while the alarmingly ruinated fragments of the old theatre by the river await their transformation.
There’s good news and bad in the season’s openings. The battle-of-the-sexes popularity of The Shrew is easy enough to understand, though as most productions are little better than parody, I tremble for its reasons. The new staging’s director is Conall Morrison from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
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