Theatre

The Taming of the Shrew

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Neil Cooper

Four stars

When boy meets girl in Shakespeare’s frothy but terminally unreconstructed rom-com, the so-called happy ending has always been at best questionable. Jo Clifford’s gender-bending new reading of the story of how Katherina learnt to succumb to Petruchio’s will proceeds to turn the play’s world upside down, break every rule going and run with it to make a whirlwind piece of queer-core cabaret inspired subversion.

Here, Katherina is a boy, a bratty swot with ideas above his station and a serious attitude problem. Kate isn’t at all like his himbo brother Bianca, who only wants to serve the women who run the world as they woo him into willing submission. Petruchio, meanwhile, is a woman who, enjoying the challenge of Kate’s resistance to her charms, is on a mission, and won’t put up with any of Kate’s nonsense, no matter how much he refuses to put out.

Over a rollicking 75 minutes, Michael Fentiman’s co-production between the Tron and their enterprising fellow travellers at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff deconstructs and reinvents Shakespeare’s original as one might with the wheel, yet, with the aid of Claire Cage’s comic pedant, somehow manages to keep the central thrust of the play’s story intact.

Scarlett Brookes takes no prisoners as Petruchio, Kate is played by Matt Gavan like an indie-kid Rik Mayall, with Francois Pandolfo a quasi-coquettish Bianca and Louise Ludgate simply magnificent as the matriarchal Baptista. If the play’s central relationship has a combative air, it is heightened by Madeleine Girling’s mini circus ring styled set, while Danny Krass’ sound design is given a live kick by the musical double act of Hannah Jarrett-Scott and Alexandria Riley.

While there is some seriously incendiary stuff going on here concerning the rich and ever changing tapestry of gender politics, making sex mosaics as they go, there is such an irreverent tone at the show’s heart that it’s clear everyone is having a cross-gendered ball.

Theatre

Romeo and Juliet

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Neil Cooper

Four stars

Everything is council estate grey in Erica Whyman’s streetwise Royal Shakespeare Company revival of Shakespeare’s teenage gang-based tragedy, in Glasgow for the final leg of its UK tour. The brutalist steel and breezeblock backdrop of Tom Piper’s set lends the play a contemporary harshness heightened even more by the babble of criss-crossing young voices who stab out the play’s prologue like a weapon.

Once things calm down, we move downtown, where, on the frontline, the Capulets and the Montagues’ unspecified beef has become a hand-me-down accessory for local youth in search of a sense of belonging and a cause to call their own, however misguided they may be in their bid to join the grown-ups.

It’s this adolescent craving for attention and to be taken seriously that fires the play here, with inter-gang bantz led by Charlotte Josephine’s motor-mouthed Mercutio as he, Benvolio and Afolabi Alli’s matinee idol Romeo attempt to crash the Capulets’ big party and get down with the cool kids. What happens next should have been the love affair of the century, but ends in tears and a community torn apart.

Beyond the brat-pack, whose numbers are fleshed out by eight performers from local schools, Ishia Bennison’s Nurse possesses the comic warmth of an old-school club turn, while Andrew French’s Friar Laurence resembles a trendy vicar getting down with the kids.

Set to Sophie Cotton’s low-key string-based score peppered with occasional smatterings of dubstep and, at one point, a live grunge band, shadows of latter-day stabbings hang over Whyman’s production like a Stanley knife. As the dressed down ensemble spar their way towards the inevitable, the ghosts of the dead occasionally appear atop the grey cube that doubles up as Juliet’s balcony like civic art monuments.

It is here that the play’s most intimate moments occur beneath Charles Balfour’s increasingly brooding lighting. Karen Fishwick makes a wonderful Juliet as she moves from lovesick teen to real life adult, with all the matters of life and death that entails in this vigorous youthquake of a show.