Rachael Stirling Online

The Taming of the Shrew

Posted by Bonnie at 12.00am

Dirty tricks, money-grabbing motives and a notion of sexual politics which makes the ducking stool look broad-minded: is this the food of love? In Nick Hutchison's playful production of The Taming of the Shrew it is, thanks mainly to Rachael Stirling, who lends the shrew Katherine a lovely sorrowful depth and a dark glimmer of humour.

Her super-sized vocal and emotional range brim over the edges of this crude and limited part and her 'tamer' husband Petruchio matches her substance with style. His cowboy-cool postures and flash-geezer attitudes look like a game he's desperate for his wife to play, too: once she submits (with complicitous glee) they beat the pants off everyone else.

Style is key: the play-within-a-play becomes a theatre-within-a-theatre, opening with a vaudeville backcloth which quotes Wilton's music hall past. Static hierarchised direction combines with nicely camped-up contemporary class references: the frontispiece usherette gives way to a tracksuited chav, and the mix of cockney, mockney and patrician scorn among the role-swapping servants and the suitors works well.

Philip Voss is typically, urbanely, excellent as desperate dad Baptista Minola, having the wool pulled over his eyes by Kate's little sis Bianca (Siobhan Hewlitt), a leggy Barbie with a delightfully manipulative fake pout. An evening of good wife-beating fun.

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Taming the Shrew who eschews cult of celebrity

Posted by Bonnie at 12.00am

Wilton's Music Hall in the heart of the East End is like a window into Dickensian London. The theatre, apparently untouched since Victorian times, is a dusty, ramshackle heap of uneven floorboards and crumbling ceilings, its paintwork peeling like a giant snakeskin.

Meeting Rachael Stirling there one frosty March morning, I am struck by the building's dilapidation. But the 29-year-old actress is adamant that the place is a jewel in the crown of London's theatreland. "It is a beautiful and haunting old building," she says. "Even if the changing rooms are draughty as hell.

"And it's a struggling independent theatre that doesn't charge the earth for tickets. Actually, it reminds me of how the Almeida was before it became so successful."

Wilton's has practically become Stirling's second home. She's just finished playing Yelena, the wife of a gloomy professor, in David Mamet's pared-down version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and now she's taking on The Taming of the Shrew, playing the shrew of the title, Katherine.

"It's a delicious part that I absolutely identify with," says Stirling. "Independent, determined, and fiercely so. She vents her frustration through anger, knowing no other way to express it. She's part Miss Piggy and part Tank Girl."

Katherine is Shakespeare's feistiest female by a yard, and the role seems tailor-made for the self-assured young Stirling, who peppers her speech with an array of expletives as she tells me an anecdote about how she scared off a mugger: "This little shitbag on a moped came up on the pavement the other night, grabbed my phone and tried to dash off at 100 miles an hour," she tells me. "Of course, the stupid arsehole dropped it, so I picked it up and shouted abuse at him."

Stirling, who is the daughter of Dame Diana Rigg, shot to fame in Tipping the Velvet. The BBC drama about a lesbian relationship in Victorian times generated predictable tabloid titillation and harassment from the paparazzi annoyed Stirling because, she tells me, she can't be doing with that aspect of our culture. "Celebrity obsession. Not my job," she says. Also, it led to a rather unsavoury fanbase. "One man traced his cock on the back of an envelope and wrote, actual life size'," Stirling tells me.

Throughout Stirling's career, comparisons with her mother have loomed large. That used to rile her, but now she's more than happy to talk about her famous mother, a sixties pin-up girl who starred in The Avengers. "Ma is, after all, an integral part of my life," she says. "And we have this shared profession. It's a real privilege to have someone in your family who does the same thing as you. We offer each other ideas. She'll be in a play and I'll say, you're meant to be an old woman. You looked a bit too agile going up those steps!'"

Stirling has carved out her own acting identity, building a career that offers great promise. So what next? Hollywood? "I don't know. It's a weird place. I did a pilot there and found the whole experience hilariously surreal. Money is no object. It's this star-making and star-fucking machine. But I do love it for its vulgarity."

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New reviews

Posted by Bonnie at 10.18pm

Hello stranger! Er, and by "stranger" I mean "this website". I haven't been around much lately as I recently started a very busy new job (which is getting busier by the day) and I've been going through all sorts of personal stuff. This poor site has been sadly neglected, despite the fact that there's plenty of stuff waiting to be uploaded to it.

I've always been an "all or nothing" kind of girl, but I've admitted defeat this time and will be doing small updates here and there. I started yesterday by adding a load of theatre reviews for Rachael's latest two plays, Uncle Vanya and The Taming of the Shrew. You can still catch the latter at Wilton's Music Hall if you happen to be in London over the next month. It's running until the end of April. I wish we could see it but it's just not going to happen, unfortunately. Maybe one day Rachael will decide to do a play up north? I've updated the site with details of her latest plays.

Coming soon…

• photos from Uncle Vanya
• photos from The Taming of the Shrew
• screencaps of The Haunted Airman
• screencaps of The Truth
• two new articles
• a few new promo pictures
• a general site tidy-up
• … and eventually a re-design, but don't hold your breath.

I'm desperate to get this site in order — the hard part is finding the time!

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The Taming of the Shrew

Posted by Bonnie at 12.00am

Standing in the foyer of Wilton's Music Hall, I found myself playing a little casting game with members of the audience: Derek Jacobi! Diana Quick! You ought to be able to do something interesting with those two — Antony and Cleopatra; a slightly older than usual Macbeth. Or even The Taming of the Shrew — having a Petruchio and Katherine both in their sixties would lend an edge of urgency to his quest for an heiress, and her father's desperation to get her married off.

Meanwhile, up on stage, Nick Hutchison's production of the play was competent and largely entertaining, but urgency was something it could have done with a bit more of. The main attraction was the presence of TV's Oliver Chris and Rachael Stirling as the crosspatch couple. Chris has been a likeable secondary presence in numerous sitcoms and sketch-shows in recent years — notably Green Wing, where he played the charming, self-satisfied Boyce.

I had him down as an essentially lightweight presence but, as it turns out, he has very little difficulty dominating the stage. Unusually for an actor, he is taller in real life than he seems on screen, towering over the rest of the cast, and he moves well, with something of a swagger. His Petruchio has the air of someone constantly enjoying a private joke, which takes the edge off the character's sadism: the scenes in the second half where he is starving and bullying his new bride into submission, which can seem to offer a foretaste of Nineteen Eighty-Four, are here hard to take too seriously. He also gives Petruchio a credible romantic streak — it's clear from the start that he really fancies Katherine.

Stirling — still best known from the TV adaptation of Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet — responds. Her early exchanges of insults with Petruchio have a quizzical, probing tone, as though she is deciding what to make of him and is pleased by the uncertainty; by the end, when she tops off his tests of wifely obedience by practically chewing his face off, it's clear that her apparent submissiveness is founded on mutual understanding and sexual fulfilment. But she lacks rage at the beginning; and in the crucial middle scenes, when she must learn that resistance is futile, it's never clear that she has anything important at stake.

This isn't Stirling's fault: rather, it's that Hutchison lacks any definite idea about what to do with this, to modern sensibilities, deeply uncomfortable play, other than to make it more comfortable. There is probably a good case for a 25-year moratorium on stagings while we all sort out what we think about sexual roles and equality. As it is, this production fails to touch any real feeling.

Still, there are incidental pleasures. The initial framing device, in which a drunken tinker is fooled into believing he is an aristocrat, and the play is being enacted for his edification, is very nicely done (though I couldn't see any reason why the tinker then takes the stage as Petruchio). The contemporary Italian design is discreetly funny, and the supporting cast mainly good. But a little more emphasis on the "shrew", and a little less on the "tame", would be nice.

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The Taming of the Shrew

Posted by Bonnie at 12.00am

Misogynistic, largely unfunny and as a result arguably Shakespeare's least appealing play, The Taming of the Shrew demands bold reinvention if it is to stand up to 21st-century scrutiny — and Nick Hutchison's production doesn't quite manage that. His interpretation flirts with a dissection of modern sexual politics but lacks the cojones to go all the way. Fortunately, in Rachael Stirling's passionate, fiercely intelligent Katherine, it has a heroine who, despite the humiliations she suffers, succeeds in discreetly wresting at least some control of her life from her negligent father and bullying husband.

The staging begins, aptly for the venue, with a leggy chorus girl and a dapper master of ceremonies before a music-hall cloth. Their introduction to the drama is interrupted by Oliver Chris's drunken, chavish Christopher Sly, in a filth-spattered tracksuit. His appearance, and the inclusion of an abbreviated version of the play's Induction, which here shows Sly being tricked into taking the role of Petruchio, signal an intention to relate the play to today. From then on the cast are dressed in jeans, leisure wear or designer clothes. But the link between the opening Victoriana and our own times is not made clear.

There is a similar lack of definition to Chris's performance. If his Sly is broke and broken, there is a wealth of possibility in the suggestion that he would revel in the fantasy of marrying into money as Petruchio. And Petruchio's ill-treatment of Katherine seems to spring, here, from social and sexual insecurity. But such notions are only glanced at, and Chris overrelies on his lanky good looks. Simplistic acting, indeed, is a problem generally, with tics, moues and comic business standing in for depth and sincerity. Siobhan Hewlett's fashionista Bianca and Charles Aitken's cherubic Lucentio, in particular, are pretty but dramatically pallid.

Happily, there are compensations. Adrian Schiller makes a lugubrious, bitter Grumio. And Philip Voss's Baptista implies not just despair, but casual cruelty. He takes no pains to disguise his disappointment in his elder daughter; and Stirling shows us, in her liquid eyes and the twist of her mouth, how much it hurts. There's a sense of her having healed Chris's inadequate Petruchio: by giving him, in her final speech, public status, she makes him her equal rather than her superior — a deal sealed in a sexually charged kiss. It hints at the uneasy truce between men and women in a so-called postfeminist society; a pity Hutchison wasn't brave enough to do more than hint.

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