Writer: William Shakespeare, adapted by Darren Raymond
Directors: Stevie Basaula and Morenike Onajobi
Intermission Youth Theatre, the annual 10-month scheme that aims to transform the lives of disadvantaged young people through drama, film and whole-person support, celebrates its 15th anniversary this year. To mark this milestone, the company is supplementing its usual production by this year’s youth cohort (Excluded!, also running at the Arcola) with Taming Who?, a production cast from the theatre company’s pool of young and talented graduates.
Artistic director Darren Raymond has adapted The Taming of the Shrew and set it in a London university, where Sara Mokonen’s serious-minded Katherine is mildly put out by the freewheeling flirtations of her little sister Bianca (Ophelia J Wisdom), who has joined the university as a fresher.
Several of Bianca’s fellow students devise deceptions to try and meet Bianca outside of her overprotective sister’s gaze, with both Kai Jerdioui’s Lucentio and Tré Medley as Hortensio flexing some fine comedic muscles as they respectively pretend to be an Italian tutor and salsa instructor.
Arriving into the mix comes Keon Martial-Phillip as Petruchio, who in an attempt to avoid being recalled home to Nigeria by his mother (co-director Morenike Onajobi) has told her that he is now married – and who then has to find someone who can fulfil that role once his mother announces she’s flying to London to meet her.
With some modernisation tweaks, then, Shakespeare’s multi-stranded plotting kicks off. Raymond’s adaptation freewheels between modern speech patterns, idioms, and lines lifted from the original, mixing it up as easily and readily as the young characters find it to code-switch when talking with their peers versus their parents. Making the mix of linguistic styles a choice on the characters’ parts is neat and fun, allowing some of Shakespeare’s juiciest lines to sit alongside Tane Siah, as Petruchio’s brother Grumio, charming us with some laidback comedic skills enhanced by his use of modern-day language.
This lightness and genuine humour mean that Act I is a great update that manages to deftly sidestep some of the more troublesome sexual politics of the original. But that same sense of comedy throws into sharp focus the more troubling aspects of the second act, as Petruchio attempts to gaslight Katherine into submission.
Martial-Phillip is chilling as he denies Mokonen’s Katherine food, a hot shower, and even sleep, removing anything pleasurable from her presence on the grounds that nothing is good enough for her. And yet Siah’s continued childlike, sunny presence gives a veneer of acceptability, even good humour, to the abusive treatment being meted out.
It’s a very odd creative decision for a production which otherwise manages to spin the sexual politics of Shakespeare’s day into a frothy and fun romantic comedy. It might just about be forgivable if Petruchio truly faces consequences for his actions, but while there are motions in that direction – Katherine’s notorious final speech about the importance of women being subservient to their husbands is delivered by Mokonen dripping in sarcasm, and she gets a new last line to emphasise how she has not, in fact, been tamed – the lack of repercussions for such coercive and misogynistic behaviour is concerning.
That considered, the re-emergence of Onajobi’s Mum at the end of the play does help to bring back that freewheeling sense of comedy with which the play started. There are also a few more nods to how even supposedly rigidly demarcated marriages such as that between Mum and her deceased husband are based more on equity and spousal love than tradition suggests.
But while the end of Taming Who? may give out slightly mixed messages, the mission of Intermission Youth Theatre could not be clearer. This cast – but a small portion of the people who the project has helped – shows the company’s value to those it helps and those who each year it brings into its family.
Here’s to the next fifteen years, and many more after that.
Continues until 14 December 2023
