Wharf 2 Theatre, September 27
4/10
No one has the nerve to let this play just be in a woke world. So a man treats a woman badly. Does this not happen? Should it not be depicted? Women also treat men badly – or, more to the point, people treat each other badly. But director Tasha O’Brien, for The Playwrought Project, decided to gender-swap every character in The Taming of the Shrew.
The concept of seeing the roles reversed was not without merit, had it been fully followed through. Alas, Petruchio, although now female, still goes by that name, and Kate, although now male, is still Kate. Surely we could at least have had a Petruchia and a Kade – or perhaps a Cain, to add some wanton biblical subtext.
It’s as though the play’s seen through a kaleidoscope of gender-distorting mirrors, or twisted into a puzzle that must be deciphered at every turn. This adds another layer of confusion, when Shrew already deals in subterfuge and mistaken identity, and it neither illuminates the text nor compounds the comedy.
Nor is it necessary. In 1976, San Francisco’s extraordinary American Conservatory Theatre barely tampered with the text, and presented a production (still commercially available) that’s a contender for the funniest Shakespeare you’ll see. A key to the success, beyond the extraordinary performances, direction and design, was that the company understood the crucial fact that seems to evade most interpreters: Petruchio doesn’t just tame Kate; Kate tames Petruchio.
Contextualised this way, the play is no piece of misogynist graffiti, but rather a hilarious satire of the nature of love and sexual politics. Instead, we endure it done O’Brien’s way, with no enlightenment at the end of the gender-swapped tunnel. Not only is it rather sad that a true understanding of the play is so rare, it also means that, messed with like this, much genuine comedy is reduced to shouting and farce.
But let’s try to shovel sexual politics aside (if that’s possible with Shrew!), and discuss what’s right (including the expert editing to just 70 minutes), for there are some splendid performances tucked away in the production’s nooks and crannies. These include Mike Howlett being effortlessly funny in the minor role of Biondello, Erin Bruce as a surprisingly elegant Gremio and Megan Elizabeth Kennedy as the wily Tranio.
The leads have a harder time because their characters have been poked and grafted until they are almost unplayable. I had no sense of the Kate that Mitchell Bourke was saddled with trying to convey (nor of the irony implicit in her closing speech of supposed subservience), nor of Will Manton’s Bianca or Natasha Vickery’s Petruchio. No credible protagonists, no play. And yet, curiously, in the face of all this reinvention, the design elements take us to some mythical matriarchal Renaissance, which could have worked delightfully had the production found a way of being true to both itself and the text.
Until October 15.
https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2025/the-taming-of-the-shrew