Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew

Despite complaints that it's the most chauvinistic play ever written, The Taming of the Shrew continues after 400 years to be one of Shakespeare's biggest crowd pleasers.

Richard Monette's rollicking Stratford treatment is set in a colourful Italy of the 1950s. Colm Feore depicts Petruchio as a swaggering leather-jacketed street bandit who roars up to marry Kate (Goldie Semple) on a sporty Lambretta. As raucous and rousing as an Italian wine festival, Shakespeare's favourite battle of the sexes has turned into a party where wits and willpower do contest, but the final victor is the belly-laugh.