Culture | Theatre When the Globe tackles one of Shakespeare ’s problematic plays it chucks tons of conceptual stuff at it and sees what sticks. In this offensive comedy set in Renaissance Padua, where Petruchio marries Katharina for her fortune against her will then ruthlessly breaks her spirit, we’re first confronted with a vast, sprawling albino teddy, with a gaping torso aperture – half-vagina, half-caesarian - through which the players enter. By the end, the bear is the least of our worries.
Jude Christian’s production has an interesting idea at its heart. But it’s obscured by cartoonish costumes, absurd design conceits, fatuously jolly anachronisms and random musical interludes that drown out the actors. As Katharina, Thalissa Teixeira maintains some dignity, but it’s hard-won.
Christian embraces Shakespeare’s framing device, in which the play is shown to the drunken beggar Christopher Sly, who’s duped into thinking he’s a nobleman. Nigel Barrett’s Sly beerily exhorts us all to sing along to Tom Jones’s hymn to femicide, Delilah, before abusing a random female audience member (Teixeira). A malign crew in clownish makeup and weird clothes (knee socks, embroidered denim tunics, velour hoodies) co-opt both him and her into performing the story.
One of them (Jamie-Rose Monk) administers a headbutt to Teixera leaving her sporting a bruise throughout, then supervises the action in a manner that’s both bored and threatening – at one point shooting a mi.