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.
