---

The play shows off Shakespeare’s remarkable talent of portraying strong-willed characters carried along by an entourage of tomfoolery, reverse psychology and getting ones just deserts. Set in Padua, the play follows the courtship of the strong-willed and outspoken Katherina, known as Kate, and the assertive Petruchio who vows to woo her with ‘spirit’, stating that if she rails, he will tell her she sings as sweetly as a nightingale!

---

Kath Mansfield (Director)

Richard Nisbet, before he died, asked me to direct in 2026. I’ve chosen The Taming of the Shrew as a tribute to Richard, who played the main part to perfection in 2002. I was the costume mistress.

The play itself is farcical; the plot bizarre. There are three suitors after two available women, and the action involves a lot of light-hearted deception.

Thematically, it focuses on the traditional roles of men and women and explores how true these stereotypes are to real life. The meek may turn out to be fierce. The outliers, compliant.

As Shakespeare writes in Measure for Measure: Hence shall we see If power change purpose, what our seemers be. The Duke’s experiment to observe if or when the mask falls from Angelo when circumstances change, is revisited in The Taming of the Shrew. In The Shrew, the action is focused on the corruption of power in a domestic setting.

As my mother always said (because her mother always said it), the man you marry is never the man you court. It’s not quite Shakespeare, but I imagine Will and my grandma shared a common understanding. William Shakespeare was an outlier. He married young. He married an older woman. He didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps. He forged his own path. He was a thinker, and he liked people who didn’t conform. He made a good living out of not conforming.

And so it is, that superficially, The Taming of the Shrew can be read as misogynistic and cruel. Yet, I perceive this play as joyfully deviant and honestly loving. The use of reversals is significant. A play within a play removes the audience a step from the action, thereby distancing them from judging the action as a reflection of real  life. The Taming of the Shrew exaggerates our weaknesses, obsessions and flaws so we can laugh at our own folly.

Set in Italy – the country associated with romance – sixteenth-century patriarchal society is shown to be foolishly concerned with the cosmetic. Not much has changed. We are still obsessed with the visual world: face-lifts and fillers and hair transplants making many a cosmetic surgeon or beautician rich.

Not much attention is paid to the deeper aspects of relationships when it comes to story-telling. Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Frozen … they all have beautiful people in cartoon form. Even Shrek and Princess Fiona are pretty fetching in their own way. We are people with eyes and ears and other senses. The intellect is hijacked by our natural proclivities. We must laugh at ourselves. We must question our sense of importance. We must be aware that socially allotted power does not always “win” if the contest is between an unmatched pair.

Kath Mansfield (Director)
Kathleen Mansfield Showreel 2019

Training

• Edinburgh Acting School Gym: 2022/24
• RSC & National Theatre of Scotland Acting Shakespeare, 2012
• Acting for Television – Actors Studio, 2009, Pinewood Studios
• Queen Margaret University – Acting Stage I & II 2001