BWW Reviews: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, The Courtyard Theatre, February 9 2011

One of the questions I used to ask of groups of students is whether one can divorce the art from the artist. Amadeo Modigliani, Michael Jackson, Phil Spector... - there's plenty more - created timeless work despite leading what might charitably be described as "interesting" personal lives. Most students had a tipping point, with only a few hanging on until the list of names reaches the likes of Leni Riefenstahl, Gary Glitter and OJ Simpson. The rise of celebrity culture will only serve to exacerbate this trend and I expect fewer and fewer people to be happy to separate art from artist in the future.

Shakespeare has the benefit of four hundred years or so to distance himself from Perez Hilton and his wannabes, but The Taming of the Shrew raises similarly awkward questions for today's audiences, inviting directors and actors to take a stance towards a text that sits there mitigated only by importing ideas and characters from other plays (in which Shakespeare is irrefutably not a misogynist). Co-directors James Tobias and Rupert Holloway leave The Courtyard Theatre's audience to draw their own conclusions in their version of the comedy set on the wrong side of the tracks in Swinging Sixties London.

After the brothelish induction leaves us in no doubt that what we will witness is farce, it's a Mary Quant aesthetic for the girls and a Stranglers punkish look for the boys as the action gets underway. Violence soon seeps into the comedy, culminating in guns, shots and blood (and you half expect someone to claim that "they only did it to their own" in 16th-century blank verse). Baptista (Kate's mother rather than father) is a Violet Kray-like matriarch, all snarling cockney acquiescence in the gangsterism that surrounds her in Kate Walsh's scarily amoral performance. Working around her in a sub-plot involving plenty of disguises, jostling and wooing, there are some fine comic cuts from Zachary Street, John Rayment and Josie Martin. But the play keeps coming back to Kate's journey from shrew (a selfish, brutal and impolite young woman) to Pete's "obedient" wife.

Matthew Flacks is both genuinely charming and genuinely nasty, as he breaks Kate's will through thoroughly moddish mind games and thoroughly unmoddish starvation and sleep deprivation. Crucially, he does stop just short of using his charisma to elicit sympathy for a character who just isn't, well, very nice - more anti than hero. As Kate, Rochelle Parry is convincingly shrewish (helped by a look that reminded me of Sharon Stone's Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct) and is able to deliver her famous monologue, with lines such as: "I am ashamed that women are so simple / To offer war where they should kneel for peace / Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway, / When they are bound to serve, love, and obey" with a fire in the eyes that suggests she is happy with a tactical retreat in a war in which she has many weapons as yet unused. Like the brides who open their wedding reception's dancing to Burt Bacharach's Wives and Lovers, her eyebrow, like the humour, is arched.

Immersion Theatre's production meets its desire to be accessible and to place the audience at the heart of the experience. Its company are mainly young and not long out of drama school, but they have shown some courage in taking on one of Shakespeare's more controversial works and leaving much of its interpretation to the audience. Keep an eye on them.

The Taming of the Shrew continues at the Courtyard Theatre until 27 February 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

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