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The Taming of the Shrew, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare's misogynistic comedy gets a #MeToo update
Role reversal: Claire Price as Petruchia and Joseph Arkley as Katherine
[Ikin Yum]
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RUNNING through Shakespeare’s early comedy is a thread of gratuitous cruelty disguised as knock-about fun.
This is admittedly offset by the fight-back of the spirited Katharina against the unconventional wooing by her domineering “tamer,” the fortune-seeking Petruchio, and it's a relationship which ends uneasily in most modern productions with the scene where true love questionably emerges, or in an ironic submission where Kate tellingly humiliates her macho persecutor.
Seizing the #MeToo moment, Justin Audibert’s production copes with the ambiguities with clean-sweep gender-swapping. Petruchio becomes Claire Price’s fiery red-headed virago Petruchia and Joseph Arkley her somewhat spineless victim. He's oddly named Katherine, possibly the reason for his temperamental tantrums.
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