Review of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (directed by Nina Spijkers for Toneelschuur Producties) at Stadsschouwburg Groningen, the Netherlands, 8 April 2019

Abstract

Although the year 2019 has not seen the usual high frequency of Shakespeare productions on the Dutch stage, the bard continues to be the most popular playwright in the Netherlands. Oddly enough, after the unassailable leader Hamlet, one of the most often performed plays in the past seventy years turns out to be The Taming of the Shrew (Heijes 668) and the year 2019 was no exception to this rule with a Taming directed by Nina Spijkers for "Toneelschuur Producties", a professional and subsidized theatre company, which has its home base in the city of Haarlem, but also tours the country with its productions. As the audience filtered in for Taming, they were confronted with a stage which resembled a changing room, with a clear differentiation between on the one hand dresses and high-heeled shoes, and on the other hand the usual shirts and jackets. The design (by Katrin Bombe) immediately set the tone for a binary and stereotypical contrast between the sexes, which was further underlined by attributes which accompanied the two sets, such as an iron and a hoover for the women and an axe and other tools for the men. As the audience had settled in, four female and two male actors entered the stage in their underwear and started dressing, the men as females, and the women as males. The stereotyping was further enhanced as the women strapped on artificial penises, and the men used bras with breast padding.The approach was part of an ongoing trend of the interchange of gender in Taming productions. In 2017, the Dutch Shakespeare Theatre Diever, a semi-professional theatre company directed by Jack Nieborg, produced a Taming in which the gender of the actors playing Petruchio and Katherina was determined on the night of the performance. The two main actors had learned both parts but did not know beforehand which part they were going to play on the night. A member of the audience, through a spin of a Wheel of Fortune, determined which actor would play which role that night. The production drew a record number of 25,000 visitors. The 2019 Jo Clifford adaptation of Taming, directed by Michael Fentiman, rewrote the play such that the male characters were female and vice versa. The 2019 RSC Taming, directed by Justin Audibert, employed an equally straightforward reversal of gender roles, set in a matriarchal past, and in the programme notes the director said he was "interested in seeing what happens when you get female actors to play traditionally powerful male roles, and vice versa".Productions of this type address themes such as the social construction of gender roles, the cultural conditioning on which they are based, and the ensuing imbalance of power between the opposing gender roles. One of the potential pitfalls tends to be that, while the gender swap as such may be interesting, the productions rather perpetuate existing, stereotypical perception of gender roles and binary identities, instead of breaking through them and presenting a more fluid picture of gender, power and identity. While at first, I thought this production...