To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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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]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
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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