Power Play Turning Patriarchy to Matriarchy in Aduibert's Taming of the Shrew

Abstract

In 2019, Justin Audibert used cross-gender casting in the RSC’s production of The Taming of the Shrew, setting the play in an alternate Elizabethan era where women hold power over men.¹ Inspired by Naomi Alderman’s matriarchal sci-fi novel The Power, Audibert’s production changes characters and lines in the play to reflect a matriarchy that is the direct inverse of the patriarchy portrayed in Shakespeare’s Shrew.² In a casting experiment some reviewers dismissed as a “gimmick”³ or an attempt at “political correctness,”⁴ Audibert swaps the genders of most of the characters in the play, with an emphasis on placing female characters in roles of power. Katherine and Bianca (Bianco, in this production) are re-gendered as male and many of the male characters are renamed and re-written as female (Petruchio becomes Petruchia, Lucentio is Lucentia, etc.). There is particular resonance to using this technique with Shrew, which owes its problem-play status to the brutality of the power imbalance in the central relationship between Katherine and Petruchio. The visual and textual coding of female authority and male subservience in the production demonstrates that the societal inequities of Shakespeare’s Padua go beyond the Katherine/Petruchio marriage, however. Audibert’s world-building reverses the power imbalance in Shakespeare’s Shrew rather than removing or correcting it, illustrating that any systemic power imbalance is destructive to communities as well as individuals. Although Audibert’s staged matriarchy is not idealized as a solution for patriarchy or for the problems of the Shrew, his gender-swapped casting presents an innovative alternative for gender parity on the Shakespearean stage.