'The Taming of the Shrew' - Wells Theatre Festival

 

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The Taming of the Shrew at the Bishop’s Barn
Wells Theatre Festival, June 22nd 2025

How does a fashionably progressive amateur troupe engage with The Taming of the Shrew in 2025 without dying of embarrassment or being cancelled? They can’t directly, so they attempt to outflank it.

Before the play even begins, we are confronted by a disruptive “audience member” in the front row: a shaven-headed, flabby, middle-aged figure brandishing beer in a plastic cup. He’s pretending to be a slightly-drunken 'anti-woke' bloke proud of his 'theatrical review blog'  -  twenty subscribers!  -  who loudly warns us that this play is nowadays branded by the woke as misogynistic, offensive, and therefore shouldn’t be staged.

We are meant to recognised the type: Brexit-voting, Reform-supporting, implicitly racist, homophobic and misogynistic - yes, it's the stereotypical, mostly mythical, 'extreme-right' hate-figure.

Subtlety has clearly come here to die.

The cast, already milling around on stage, break character (or rather begin with no character at all) with performative outrage: “We’ll show him,” they say. “We're progressive enough to not be scared of this play: we’ll show you how progressives can handle stereotypes!”

This heckler, this grunting mouthpiece of reactionary idiocy, now segues into mouthing Shakespeare’s lines. Yes, he's transitioned into Christopher Sly, the play's drunken tinker duped into believing he is more important than he is. It’s all very clever, in the undergraduate sense of that word: the cast has grabbed the moral high ground.

The actual play, once it lurches into gear, is a more familiar kind of disappointment. Passages are recited as if in a memory test (those pauses: are they for dramatic effect or did he/she forget their lines?). The actors try their best but don't know what it would mean to inhabit the roles they've been given.

Kate is played as a sassy, knockabout feminist from a BBC3 sitcom; Petruchio, her foolhardy suitor, as a buffoon in silly clothing. Their dynamic is devoid of sophistication: just Punch and Judy (yawn). We are subjected to a parade of clunky, disjointed scenes in which nobody quite believes in what they’re doing, though plainly the taming of the shrew is intended to show the taming of the suitor.

Younger sister Bianca’s successful suitor, for reasons not wholly explored in the Bard's original text, is here rewritten as a woman... so the play will end with a same-sex marriage. One feels Bianca could equally well have partnered with her cat, her mother or the much put-upon horse for all the dramatic validity of this interesting choice. Who knew sixteenth century Padua was as rich in diverse coupling opportunities which no-one seems to feel at all odd? 

The fundamental problem here is not only ideological but also theatrical. The Taming of the Shrew is a very early play  -  probably 1590 or 1591  -  and comes from the period when Shakespeare was still writing in the idiom of broad farce and folk theatre. It’s full of commedia archetypes, exaggerated violence, and noisy, low comedy. Grumio, the fool, was almost certainly written for William Kempe, the Elizabethan equivalent of a stand-up comic in hose and slapstick shoes. There is no psychological realism, no domestic subtlety. The whole thing indeed plays out like a Punch and Judy show in iambic pentameter.

That doesn't mean it’s unplayable. But it does require clarity of vision: either lean into the grotesquery or interrogate it with intelligence. What this production offered instead was a mixture of self-congratulation, progressive-preening and timidity — a play about performing Shakespeare in a modern context, not a performance of Shakespeare himself.

We left at the interval. The ice-creams outside were nice.

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