It is easy to see how an audience in the 1590’s, who took bear-baiting in their stride, might find the breaking of a woman’s spirit hilarious. But today, with political correctness a major issue, it really is amazing how popular this sadistic farce still is. 100 years ago the suffragettes used to boo The Taming of the Shrew. There was a time, too, in the late 20th century when feminists in America and Canada stopped the play being performed.
One way round the problem is to cast two attractive personalities and have Petruchio and Kate fall in love at their first meeting. Another way is to do exactly what Shakespeare does (and the RSC does here) is to act The Taming of the Shrew as a play within a play, as a bit of frantic slapstick in the commedia dell’arte manner, and aim it at an audience with an IQ of an ignorant, drunken tinker. It’s still unpleasant, of course; but it’s a play, not real life. Petruchio (David Caves, always the madcap ruffian, never the gent) decides to marry a dead-common scold because of her dowry and then goes on to prove that he can be even more shrewish than she is. At the end of the marriage service, not pausing for any refreshment, Kate is tied up like a parcel and carted off to his home where she is starved and humiliated.
Lucy Bailey’s production sets the story in 1940’s Italy and has the action taking place on a giant bed which fills the whole stage. Bailey sees all the domestic violence as the sexual foreplay of two turbulent misfits. The audience groans out loud at the relentless vulgarity, the explicit crudity, the spitting, the urinary jokes, and, not least, the constant and disgusting sight of the obese tinker’s naked body. Lisa Dillon delivers Kate’s notorious final speech, not as a generalisation on how women should behave to their husbands, but as a frank admission that the way she used to behave was all wrong. Her seriousness is out of place and doesn’t ring true.