Much fuss was made over Mark Rylance starring in an all-male Twelfth Night recently, but Edward Hall's Propeller company has been presenting single-sex Shakespeare to acclaim for years.
I fear I have caught the troupe in a rare off-patch, as this coarse and strident double bill, playing in rep at the theatre of which Hall is also artistic director, proves deeply unrewarding viewing.
The Taming of the Shrew is, depending on your point of view, either a tricky play or a deeply unpleasant one, as bullish Petruchio (Vince Leigh) sets out to “tame” his bride Katherine (Dan Wheeler).
Overplaying the drama in such an effortful manner as the ensemble does here sorts precisely nothing out and there is a jarring disjunction between the jokey tone of the production — Bianca studies The Joy of Sex with an over-eager suitor-tutor — and the brutal reading of the final act. Not for Hall the usual (some would say fudged) suggestion of playful acquiescence from a now-enamoured Kate; instead she cowers on the floor in subjugation and terror.
For my money Twelfth Night, that spinning top of gender and sexual confusion, has as much profundity as any of Shakespeare’s tragedies but Hall doesn’t allow this beautiful text space to breathe. Nuance and subtlety are pounded into submission — Malvolio singing Love Me Do, anyone? — and members of the company wearing half-masks hover disconcertingly at the edges of each scene.
Ben Allen’s Olivia is languorously draped in melancholy at the start, but given that Joseph Chance’s Viola/Cesario displays minimal suggestion of femininity, the delicious triple layer of disguise — a man playing a woman pretending to be a man — is wasted.
In rep until July 20 (020 7722 9301, hampsteadtheatre.com)
