Lorna Irvine finds much to love in the much hated Shakespeare play.
The most overtly misogynistic of Shakespeare's plays, less sugar than spite, should have every right-thinking man and woman booing and hissing at its cruel central motif (a case of how to break a feisty woman's spirit in five easy stages) but this adaptation by Sandy Nelson, a PPP favourite, is sweaty, rollicking good fun—albeit with a vinegary aftertaste.
Nelson himself plays the wealthy patriarch Baptista Minola as swaggering steely-eyed gangster, with blonde daughter Bianca his equal in emotional manipulation (Lorna Gold batting her eyelashes like Doris Day gone bad) as two suitors fight for her affection. It's clear the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
However it's Iain Robertson's Pertuchio and Rebecca Elise as Bianca's ''shrewish'' sister Katherine who nail the battle of the sexes all the way—the former gleefully wicked, confessing all to the audience like a lapsed Catholic; the latter a proto-feminist, ultimately crushed like a bug by the 'sanctity' of marriage and her 'Lord and master’. Their cat-and-mouse exchanges are the most delightful, played out like the terrific screwball comedies of Hepburn and Tracy, were they both raised on Irn-Bru and Buckfast.
The exhausting performances of all the cast never let up—Robertson, in particular, showing how the most objectionable of the Bard's bastards can reign in malice yet still somehow be mischievous; it's not every day you see a drunk full-bearded man in a meringuey wedding dress, suggestively swinging a ladle from his groin.
Full credit to Rosie Kellagher's direction, full of wit and verve like a catwalk of grievances: fine and waspish indeed; tame, never.
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