Review: TAMING WHO?, Arcola Theatre

Forty years ago, in his most iconoclastic period, Alexei Sayle remarked, 

“How can you tell Shakespeare is making a joke?”

“Because NOBODY’S LAUGHING!”

Ol’ Lex should get along to The Arcola for Taming Who?, which may not quite be Shakespeare (though Darren Raymond’s adaptation retains the essential armature of The Taming of the Shrew) but hits a laugh quotient higher than many a panto in town. Cutting judiciously and injecting the argot of the London street into snappy, quickfire dialogue, he gets a tremendous reaction from the audience, including this 60 year-old white man who isn’t fluent in the slang at all! One can’t help thinking that Shakey himself, who always prioritised entertainment over a dusty prompt book, would approve.

The cast have so much fun under Stevie Basuala’s pacy direction. Tane Siah brings hilarious reaction shots to Grumio, Petruchio’s sidekick, in this version brought in to witness Kate’s (still cruel) coercive control as her would-be husband breaks her shrewishness - or does he? Having a man in the hotel room where it happens mitigates the worst elements of the infamous scene which can look dangerously like domestic violence if played too close to the text. 

Through there are comic performances to savour right through the cast, Kai Jerdioui milks his faux Italian stylings superbly as the fake tutor, Cambio (Lucentio) and Tré Medley executes pratfall after pratfall as the useless suitor Hortensio, revealing himself to be quite a rare beast, a natural physical comedian.

Keon Martial-Phillip and Sara Mokonen impress as the principals, Petruchio motivated by his mother’s demand that he join her in Africa (he’s a London boy) and Kate always with half an eye on what she really wants, as she falls for his charm which always filters through the outrageous negging. It’s crucial that we believe they are genuinely in love and that Kate is as shrewd as she is shrewish - it’s a testament to the acting and writing that we do.

That carefully constructed tension in the relationship pays off perfectly in as fine a denouement as I’ve seen in any version of the play. Thankfully, we lose the spaniel line, but Kate does come running when Petruchio whistles and then gets a lecture from his mother (a tremendous turn from Morenike Onajobi) about what a good African wife should be. Kate’s smart enough to know that she loves Petruchio and that he loves her, so it’s barely an imposition to play along, much to the horror of her friends. Neither quite wink at each other, nor at us, but they know and we know exactly what’s going on. And she gets precisely what she wanted as a result, albeit in a slightly unnecessary coda. Eyes on the prize, Kate, eyes on the prize.

The show is a continual delight, bang up to date and packed with laugh after laugh, but never sailing too far from its source material, with a few lines of blank verse interspersing the occasional “Innit” to remind us. There’s so small a space to find between the anachronistic gender relations on the page and a staging that moves the distance required not to be offensive nor preposterous to 21sr century audiences, but this Intermission Youth production hits the bullseye.  

Well played Kate and good luck Petruchio - I think you might need it!

Taming Who? is at the Arcola Theatre until 14 December

Read our guest blog from Darren Raymond on 20 years of creating opportunity and transforming young lives for the better here.

Photo Credits: Lidia Crisafulli 

       

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