Watching Jo Clifford’s riotous reimagining of The Taming of the Shrew is like looking at your reflection in a cracked mirror through the wrong end of a kaleidoscopic telescope. For everything is distant, distorted and dazzling.

In her post-patriarchal dreamworld, top is bottom, predators are prey and love in the words of Johnny Cash is a boy named Sue. Or rather Kate.

If you are unfamiliar with the original, you will leave as you arrived with a lot of blanks unfilled. Much like Doctor Octavia Blank whose pontifications on early modern identity politics in Shakespearean comedies is straight out of Monty Python. The Larch.

Confused? You should be. For in recent years traditional notions of gender, sexuality and identity have been tossed in the air like confetti. Particularly in relation to the unfair sex who after a century of feminism are playing catch-up and grappling for a foothold on the ever-steepening rock face of change.

To a converted audience of liberal-minded theatregoers, the play is a blast. One in-joke hoot after another. With structure, character and conventions chopped and changed at the lash of an S&M whip. But the untamed and those not up to speed with all things LGBTQIA – seven letters: great for equality, crap for Scrabble – are outside the tent. Either through alienation or choice.

As are the shape-shifting and gender-bending characters who with microphone or electric guitar in hand (and in one instance a suggestive, unpeeled banana) spend most of the 75 minutes on the periphery of Madeleine Girling’s concrete circus ring of a set. Around which a black curtain conceals and reveals with the knowing naughtiness of a burlesque striptease.

Bold, inventive and dry as a nun’s crotch, director Michael Fentiman’s absurdist production for the Tron and Sherman Theatre (their second collaboration after The Motherf**ker with the Hat) is at times too clever and out-there for its own good; but it’s a rollicking roller coaster of a ride – which is more than can be said for Matt Gavan’s petulant Kate who is dismissed as a “stinking piece of shite”.

Peter Callaghan
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