You can understand the urge to rethink Shakespeare’s problematic comedy. Jo Clifford’s recent radical adaptation at the Sherman, Cardiff, is quickly followed by Justin Audibert’s similarly gender-flipped RSC production in which the sexual roles are reversed and Petruchia overcomes an obdurate bloke still called, in a matriarchal society, Katherine.
Some will object that this version goes too far: my main complaint is that it doesn’t go far enough. Even if you regender all the pronouns and imagine a Renaissance world where women hold sway, you can’t get away from the big issue: that the action hinges on physical and psychological dominance. Claire Price admittedly makes Petruchia a likable swaggerer with a strange fondness for her recalcitrant partner. She still, however, announces that her husband is “my goods, my chattels ... my any thing”, still subjects him to sensory and sleep-deprivation and, crucially, still declares that a lasting marriage is based on “awful rule and right supremacy”. While it is mildly subversive to hear those words spoken by a woman, it is a reminder that this is ultimately a play about power.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Joseph Arkley is an unusually mild and submissive Katherine. I had hoped he might be more of a disruptive anarchist or at least a damaged figure in need of curative therapy. Aside, however, from a few rude manual gestures to his younger brother’s wooers, he seems a strangely quiescent figure, which makes Petruchia’s punitive treatment look even more disproportionate: it’s rather like seeing Sir Andrew Aguecheek being given the third degree. Arkley is at his best in the notorious final speech which, in spite of its air of sexual surrender, he delivers with an unaffected charm.
The production is at its liveliest in the subplot which for once is clear and comprehensible. Among the suitors for James Cooney’s vain, head-tossing Bianco, the funniest is Gremia, whom Sophie Stanton endows with the sort of gliding walk that Mark Rylance used when playing Olivia in Twelfth Night and with a lasciviousness that makes her salivate at the prospect of having Bianco’s dainty hand. Emily Johnstone also suggests that the equally amorous Lucentia is a dippy, upper-class girl who wouldn’t get anywhere without Laura Elsworthy as her inventive aide-de-camp, and Amy Trigg as Biondella relishes the best line in the play which is: “I knew a wench married in an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit.”
The production looks handsome enough and Ruth Chan’s music, described as “rock Renaissance”, has the best of both worlds. Yet, for all the care lavished on it, I came away more puzzled than enlightened by this production. It banishes the framing device, involving a drunken tinker, which plausibly suggests the entire action is a waking dream. More seriously, it never shows why physical abuse and financial opportunism are any more endearing when practised by women than by men. I suspect that if you want to regender the play for the modern age you have to do a total rewrite. Or you could, as the RSC did in 2003, pair it with John Fletcher’s sequel, The Tamer Tamed, which shows the overweening hero getting his deserved comeuppance.
At the Royal Shakespeare theatre until 31 August. Cinema broadcast on 5 June. Touring from 25 September to 4 April 2020.
