The cast is, as usual, first-rate, although Frances Barber is sometimes a little too shrill as Kate granted the character is described repeatedly as a shrew, but there's shrewishness that's funny and shrewishness that's just unpleasant. (One of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights seemed to think the same thing, and wrote a sequel called The Tamer Tamed: Petruchio's second wife turns the tables on him.) Not much irony in this production either it's played straight. (To his credit, he never actually hits her, but that's setting the bar pretty low.) Many productions try to get around the implications by making it all seem ironic, but I've never been able to find that irony in the text. The spirited Kate has a few moments of tenderness with her crazy husband Petruchio, but only after she's been starved, deprived of sleep, and forced to debase herself in front of others. The Taming of the Shrew is another early Shakespeare play, and it's one that makes me distinctly uncomfortable - maybe even more so than The Merchant of Venice, another "problem play." It is, in my opinion, a misogynistic play.
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