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Space Theatre. It might be called collage theatre. Its object is to since up the speeches of Shakespeare and paste them together again so that a fresh light and a new interpretation is cast upon the familiar situations and the familiar characters. Having already provided this treatment to Hamlet Macbeth and Othello. Mr Marowitz now shows us in The Shrew how the message of a maschuline victory in the sex war can be made to look less amusing than the Bard would have it. The story of how Petruchio, who came to »Wive et wealthily in Padua«, tamed the rebellious Katherine by bullying and starving her into submission, has always been played as a rollicking farce.

As each indignity is heaped upon the shrewish Kate, the audience is tickled by the prospect of her having all her independence and spirit crushed out of her. In her final speech she advises all women to serve, love and obey their husbands because they are their lords keepers, heads, sovereigns. It is enough to send Women Libbers screaming up the wall. In his synopsised version of the story, Mr Marowitz has changed all that. This is no farce, but a Gothic tragedy. Petruchio is no gay gallant, but a paranoiac sadist determined to use every violent trich to destroy the wilful Kate. When his work is done, she has been driven mad and her protestations of devotion are nothing more than the rumblings of an idiot.

Sandwiched between these short scenes is a contemporary anecdote about the sex war showing how a modern Kate can still castrate her lover of his manliness by insisting that he give up his job and his friends to prove his devotion to her. By equalising the arguments in this way—each sex has its bullies and sadist—Mr Marowitz, I think, has dissipated the suggestion of a fierce conspiracy among men to keep women in their place. In other words, he lets his own sex off the hook. But it is still a clever and ingenious idea with Thelma Holt ooking glacially contemptuous and aloof as a Kate who imperiously loathes men and Nikolas Simmonds giving a sinister rampaging perormance as the vicious Petruchio.