When I heard Shakespeare’s Globe was going to stage The Taming of the Shrew with Irish actors, it seemed a really good idea. The Irish are very adept at mixing tragedy and farce.
Caroline Byrne has set her production in 1916; but since there is no mention of the Easter Uprising, either verbally or visually, you wonder why she is so specific. The taming would be better a decade earlier in the same period as J M Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World
The comedy has never been popular with feminists and the politically correct; but it is always box office in the theatre. Much of the play is so brutal that it is not funny at all. Edward MacLiam’s mad Petruchio (“I am rough and woo not like a babe”) is far more shrew than Aoife Duffin’s headstrong Katharine
Byrne’s production never gels and it seems, scene by scene, as if the actors are acting in two different plays. At present the brutality and the broad comedy jar equally; it would be so much more coherent to act it all for real.