Taming of the Shrew - Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory

The Taming of the Shrew is not one of Shakespeare’s most timeless plays. The device which bookends the main play of the nobleman who tricks and abuses the drunken tinker Christopher Sly may have been highly comical to Shakespearian audiences, but leaves a very unpleasant taste in the mouth in these more egalitarian times. Meanwhile the main play features far too many displays of an outdated humour: the joust of wit. Sitting around trumping one another with hilarious one-liners may well have been the height of social entertainment in the days before Dancing on Ice - but sadly it has not stood the test of time as well as the human universals such as Macbeth's anguish, Malvolio's vanity or Lear’s rage. And then there is the tricky question of the whole husband/wife thing that lies at the heart of the plot: not necessarily insurmountable, but certainly a challenge in the enlightened Noughties.
Added to the questionable nature of the play are the questionable decisions of this production. Both the main characters are strangely interpreted. Saskia Portway’s Kate is not shrewish: she is just grumpy, angry, sour-tempered - all the time. There is no subtlety or superiority to her - just bile. And in taming her, Leo Wringer’s Petruchio does not simply assume the mantle of the domestic tyrant: he acts like a frothing lunatic. In this production, Kate is not a headstrong young woman tamed by a forceful man into a partnership of ‘different but equals’ (the one interpretation which can make the play’s message palatable to a modern audience) - she is a sour-tempered bitch terrified into submission by a railing psychopath.
But being Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, it is obviously not all bad. Chris Donnelly (Tranio) remains an outstanding and tremendously assured comic actor, although he has a serious rival for his crown in newcomer Oliver Millingham. Annabel Scholey offers a pleasantly multidimensional Bianca, and Roland Oliver’s Baptista is an imperturbable rock of Establishment granite, despite being dressed as a vol-au-vent.
I interviewed Andrew Hilton when he first launched Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory: he told me that the idea was that the project would run for several years, and then lie fallow for a while. He has not kept to that plan, and sadly it’s is starting to show. Although there are obviously major commercial pressures that militate against it, it is perhaps time for Andrew and his troupe to take some time out to recuperate and rediscover the energy that made the earlier productions so unique.