The bed's too big without Shrew

Buy photos » It must be love - David Caves (Petruchio) Lisa Dillon (Kate). (s)

Taming of the Shrew

RSC

Stratford

THIS JOYOUS Shrew could have been subtitled after The Police classic The Bed's Too Big Without You.

Director Lucy Bailey has taken the bed as a metaphor for life – as the bed is where most of us are born, experience sex for the first time, and die – and set the Bard's increasingly popular battle of the sexes on a stage which is a giant bed.

For all their sparring, this diminutive angry Kate (Lisa Dillon) and giant aimless wanderer Petruchio (David Caves), quickly realise they need each other, and that their respective beds are far too big without one another.

The play, while being no stranger to the stage, has for a long time proved something of a guilty pleasure. But the view of the play as misogynist, which held sway for a while, has in recent times been superseded by one which sees two high-spirited people having to get together for their own sakes - and sanity.

Kate's closing submissive speech may remain a defeated woman stumbling block for some, but for others it's merely the beginning, and Dillon delivers the speech beautifully, with both a sense of relief and knowing knowing the marriage bed is but a few words away, and so it proves as they both rush for the privacy of the bed-covers. This Kate is far from downtrodden and defeated.

Bailey sets her Shrew in 1940s Italy – where an unmarried woman remained an 'oddity' - on the imaginative giant bed stage, with the bedstead backdrop opening to reveal a Padua street, and with music supplied by on stage oompah band.

Bailey also has a reputation for the physicality of her productions, and this is no exception.

A liquor-loving chain-smoking Kate comes out fighting, swinging her Shrew Fiddle - a type of stocks come handcuffs - at all and sundry, while hyperactive Petruchio appears to have OD'ed on the espressos.

There is a great chemistry between the two main protagonists from the off, but this is no two lovers show.

There is strength in depth - from Gavin Fowler's clean cut Lucentio and Sam Swainsbury's square Hortensio, to John Marquez's chancer Tranio and David Rintoul's increasingly desperate Gremio,

Petruchio's drink addled man Grumio (Simon Gregor) and Huss Garbiya's dim Biondello.

Terence Wilton also shines as Kate's incredulous father, as does Elizabeth Cadwallader as her sister Bianca, notably in her hilarious begging of Kate not to make a "bondmaid and slave of me" having had her legs and arms actually bound with rope by Kate.

Bailey also makes a big thing of the play's induction, and Nick Holder's Christopher Sly regularly threatens to steal the limelight with his brief cameos throughout, and at the end the Lord evens pays him off for the fun they have had at his expense.

This production leaves Kate and Petruchio at the beginning of a long can't live with each other, can't live without each other road. Whatever happens further down the road their journey here will live long long in the memory.

The Taming of the Shrew runs in Stratford until February 18 before touring. For tickets and further details visit www.rsc.org.uk