[In the following excerpted review, Morley describes a traveling production of The Taming of the Shrew directed by Lindsay Posner in 1999 as “noisily simplistic but generally joyous.”]

Of all the other major Shakespeares, it is now The Merchant of Venice, on account of its anti-Semitism, and The Taming of the Shrew, on account of its male chauvinist piggery, which always cause the most difficulty to politically correct directors and audiences alike. Brave, therefore, of the RSC at home to make a radical new staging by Lindsay Posner of the Shrew their regional tour for 2000: after this week's opening at the Barbican Pit it goes to Stratford for Christmas and then sets off around Ellesmere Port, Middlesbrough, Ollerton, Braintree, Penzance, Ebbw Vale, Barnsley, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Littleport and Barrow-in-Furness through June of next year, playing not in conventional theatres but in sports arenas, schools, leisure centres and even church halls.

So the production has to be very flexible, minimally scenic and designed to appeal to audiences who seldom or never get to see Shakespeare locally; it also has to work with a cast of relative unknowns willing to spend the next six months on the road in often uncongenial surroundings. Given all of that, Lindsay Posner's production is close to triumphant; it uses Internet computer screens by way of scenery, goes for a vibrant theatricality closer sometimes to Kiss Me Kate than Shakespeare's original, and tackles the final, abject, embarrassing surrender of Katharine to her lord and master Petruchio by suggesting that she has suddenly decided to pay any price to get him into her bed. Posner's is a gimmicky gallop through a familiar text, neatly skirting the minefields of modernity and assembling a cast which, if not exactly distinguished or experienced, is led from the front by two feisty performances from Stuart McQuarrie as Petruchio and Monica Dolan as Kate. This version also gives us the usually cut Christopher Sly prologue, which sets the whole story in the framework of a drunken dream, thereby further alienating us from the problems of chauvinist reality and abusive manhood. Catch it if you can, as it makes its noisily simplistic but generally joyous way around the country over the next six months.