When the Globe tackles one of Shakespeare’s problematic plays it chucks tons of conceptual stuff at it and sees what sticks. In this offensive comedy set in Renaissance Padua, where Petruchio marries Katharina for her fortune against her will then ruthlessly breaks her spirit, we’re first confronted with a vast, sprawling albino teddy, with a gaping torso aperture – half-vagina, half-caesarian - through which the players enter. By the end, the bear is the least of our worries.
Jude Christian’s production has an interesting idea at its heart. But it’s obscured by cartoonish costumes, absurd design conceits, fatuously jolly anachronisms and random musical interludes that drown out the actors. As Katharina, Thalissa Teixeira maintains some dignity, but it’s hard-won.
Christian embraces Shakespeare’s framing device, in which the play is shown to the drunken beggar Christopher Sly, who’s duped into thinking he’s a nobleman. Nigel Barrett’s Sly beerily exhorts us all to sing along to Tom Jones’s hymn to femicide, Delilah, before abusing a random female audience member (Teixeira).
A malign crew in clownish makeup and weird clothes (knee socks, embroidered denim tunics, velour hoodies) co-opt both him and her into performing the story. One of them (Jamie-Rose Monk) administers a headbutt to Teixera leaving her sporting a bruise throughout, then supervises the action in a manner that’s both bored and threatening – at one point shooting a minor character – before assuming the role of patriarch Vincentio at the end.
So society is institutionally abusive and misogynist, and we are all trapped in an absurdist nightmare where violence and coercive control elicit laughter… until they don’t. I think this is what Christian is getting at. Likewise I think Katharina’s biddable sister Bianca speaks through a doll because society has infantilised her, and Petruchio through a ventriloquist’s dummy of himself because he’s parroting learned attitudes. Eloise Secker as Petruchio’s servant Grumio has a pillow gaffer-taped to her midriff to protect against his beatings.
But why do Bianca’s unsuitable suitors speak through giant Hieronymus Bosch faces strapped to their stomachs and why does her dad have Shrek feet and hands? Why does her true love Lucentio always exit via a mini-trampoline? Why the flatulent brass interludes? The Globe’s habitual disregard for gender norms here muddies rather than illuminates a play where gender is significant and identity already confusing.
As Petruchio, Andrew Leung has some of Matt Smith’s mingled charm and menace. There are poignant moments of abject fear from Secker, and consolation between her and Teixeira. All of this gets lost in the conceptual soup.
I think Christian aims to jolt us out of preconceptions that the play can’t be funny as well as horrible and isn’t relevant to today. But I sympathized most with Teixeira’s line when she steps out of Katherina’s character and back into the persona of an audience member caught up in a nightmare: “Can we stop!”
