The Taming of the Shrew (1.50 MB)

There have been ten productions of The Taming of the Shrew by the Royal Shakespeare Company since it was formed to replace the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1961. The play's popularity over the last four decades has been ensured both by its energetic theatricality and its provocative exploration of gender and class politics. Interpolations from the anonymous play,The Taming of A Shrew, printed in 1594, in which Sly remains as onstage audience and sometimes interrupts the play within the play, have allowed directors to pursue the late twentieth-century's preoccupation with artifice and role play.

Seven productions have been chosen here, omitting those in 1961, 1992 and 1999. In 1961 John Barton took advantage of the newly installed revolving stage to allow glimpses of the players relaxing in their Green Room as the set alternated between the exterior and the interior of a country inn. Bill Alexander's 1992 production likewise made good use of additions from A Shrew, rescripting the Induction for a group of aristocratic young people led by 'Lord Simon' whose neurotic anger and love of power-games motivated his callous behaviour towards his friends as well as to an unquenchably good-humoured Sly. Sly and his hosts sat at the rear of the stage throughout, a place from which Sly occasionally intervened, forgetting that this was only a play taking place before him. The aristocrats also found themselves drawn into the action when they were obliged to play the roles of awkward servants in Petruchio's household.