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.
