Written by: William Shakespeare
Directed by: Jude Christian
Jude Christian’s 2023 all-woman production of Titus Andronicus in The Sam Wanamaker Theatre replaced gory deaths with snuffed-out candles, offering a lyrical take on a gratuitously violent play. That interpretation had a clear, thoughtful thesis, making her a perfect candidate to tackle another of Shakespeare’s questionable early works. However, her new staging of The Taming of the Shrew at The Globe is an incoherent mess of silly costumes and broad humour.
The performance starts in typical Globe style with a ruckus in the audience that turns out to be one of the actors shouting drunkenly and stumbling through the standing punters. He climbs onto the stage and for a moment we wonder if this is perhaps not part of the play, especially when he spills some of his drink on a woman in the audience. When she follows him on stage and throws a drink in his face after he slurs a racially insensitive remark at her, it all feels rather tense. But it soon transpires that this is the character Christopher Sly, played with a commanding stage presence by Nigel Barrett as a slovenly, pink-faced boomer. He yells “shrew!” at the confident girl who won’t stand for his abuse, and the scene is set for a culturally relevant retelling of the play. But unfortunately, it doesn’t quite pan out that way.
Sly passes out and when he wakes, the rest of the company deceives him into thinking he is a lord who has just woken up from a long sleep. This prologue is often cut from productions as Sly doesn’t return after the opening scenes. In Christian’s production, however, he is key to the surreal dream logic of the staging. As part of his punishment, Sly is made to act in a play. The actors line up and read out the parts they have been given. Sly is to play the part of Gremio, one of Bianca’s suitors, and the woman he insulted is roped in to be Katharina, the shrew.
The play within a play that follows is performed, it seems, by unreliable actors. Their expressions are exaggerated and relentlessly comical, and their costumes seem to be made out of whatever was lying around in the wardrobe department. The action takes place as if the characters are constantly aware of their artificiality. This is extended into puppet versions of some of the characters, which appear sporadically, acting to mitigate some of the more uncomfortable parts, to represent the artificiality of certain characters at certain points, or merely for laughs.
There are some references in the text to puppets – Katherina bemoans at one point that Petruchio means to make a puppet of her – but making this metaphor literal and running with it seems fairly arbitrary and takes away the human connection in some key moments. When Petruchio first attempts to woo Katherina, for example, he does it through the medium of a marionette of himself, in a silly voice, and distances himself from her in a scene that usually bristles with creepy, charismatic intimacy.
It becomes clear that none of it is really supposed to make sense. The best explanation for all the weird costumes and puppets is that we are in a theatrical dimension created solely to confuse and punish Christopher Sly, who for the most part sits sheepishly in a cage on one side of the stage. Everything happens as if it were the fever dream of a man in a drunken stupor. It’s all highly comical and entertaining in its own way but it frequently sidesteps tackling the themes of the play.
As Kate is “tamed” by Petruchio, we don’t see her gradually change; instead, she begrudgingly goes along with him and then suddenly agrees to kiss him. It’s as if the actor who plays Kate in the play within the play thinks the part is tiresome. At one point she makes this explicit, bursting out with “This is a stupid play!” In some ways, this is a thought-provoking experiment but it lacks coherence. It’s like something workshopped over the course of an afternoon in an improv class, with each actor just trying out ideas.
Andrew Leung as Petruchio is effeminate and petulant, like an entitled rich boy. He never quite seems threatening but rather just annoys people into doing what he wants. Usually the dominant character in the play, here he comes across as pathetic. It’s all rather disappointing because we never truly feel the darkness of the subject matter. Katharina’s famous speech at the end about how a woman must be unfailingly obedient to her husband, though performed with true passion by Thailissa Teixeira, cannot ring true because of all the baffling nonsense that has gone before.
The production is full of broad comedic turns to create that raucous Globe atmosphere, as well as playful costumes and set design that place the play in an uncanny, timeless limbo – the set is mostly taken up by a huge marshmallowy teddy bear with a door ripped up through its stomach. However, it will disappoint anyone here for true chemistry and meaning.
Runs until 26 October 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Baffling mess
