How are you finding the touring aspect of the show?

Alex Cartlidge (Tour Manager) - “It’s exciting, each venue and each state enjoys different aspects, and that means we aren’t allowing the show to grow stale, it’s evolving and adapting throughout the tour, and our final home run will be a very different show from the one we previewed in August.”

What was the most surprising aspect of American culture that you came across?

Robbie Taylor Hunt - “Firstly, the sheer quantity of food. A blessing and a curse. At lunch at Homerton I will eat up my friends' leftovers happily, but here that desire not to waste food by finishing others' meals is a dangerous game. Also, we were surprised by how some of the high schools are just like you see in films. The cafeteria with a table of cheerleaders, a table of jocks, a table of IB kids, was weirdly similar to what you'd see on the big screen. The theatre kids ate in the drama studio...”

Good to know.

How did you find performing to American audiences? Are there any differences between British and American audiences, or even between different states?

Will Peck - “The challenge with Shakespeare always comes in getting across the sense: ensuring that your audience can understand well enough to keep up with the pace of the play. With such a fast-paced production, that challenge is present irrespective of audience. Within workshops we were often asked if we found Shakespeare easier than our hosts did, and our consistent response was ‘no’. With respect to content, however, there was some slight modulation depending on the venue: we anticipated Catholic high schools wouldn't take well to dick jokes and so those were dropped.”

Aoife - “A big myth we've had to dispel amongst American students is that British people have some sort of magical affinity with Shakespeare. We've put a lot of work into diction and clarity across the play as a whole, especially when introducing regional accents to differentiate between characters. The structure of the verse and the archaic language present just as much of a potential barrier for audiences either side of the pond.”

Cambridge productions usually only run for a week, how did it feel performing the same play for over a month?

Will Bishop - “It never feels like the same play! The usual after-show notes session would always offer places to improve for every performance, but we never say that we have a finished product. We are always seeking to change the show through reworking certain relationships, trying out new jokes, adopting different tones (and accents), and generally making mischief onstage. We never get bored, we never get stale, we never perform the same show twice.”

What have been the main challenges of touring a Shakespeare play?

Alex - "From a tour manager perspective, handling 19 people is tricky work, but luckily we have a great group and a show we love and find very fun. I think if we were doing King Lear it would be very draining on our energy".

Laura - "When Alex and I got the show, our first thought was that we have to craft a show to please American student audiences who can't understand our accents and might be more interested in our actors than our production. So you have to tailor the show to that audience which obviously risks alienating the Cambridge audience we return to".

Alex - "This is different for us all in that it is not a show crafted specifically for a Cambridge audience, but the feedback we have been receiving makes us confident that our show is funny - and silly - enough to entertain everyone of all ages. Men in drag, innuendo, and extravagant French accents, they're Pythonesque. It doesn't matter which century you're performing in, or setting your play in, the fact is that penis jokes will never get old."

How does this production handle the inherent misogyny in the text?

Alex - “One of the main challenges is how to bring out the humour but not to avoid the subtext.”

Laura Sedgwick (Tour Manager) - “If you go down the avenue of misogyny in a Jacobean society you could end up with a hard hitting show, but what you would take away would be straightforward.”

Kennedy Bloomer (Director) - “And if you make Taming a straightforward play about misogyny, you end up with the idea that misogyny is in itself straightforward and resolvable. It isn’t - misogyny is complex and reacted to in different ways by different people. In our version this is acknowledged. The Hollywood romance of Lucentio and Bianca is arguably more problematic than the Petruccio/Kate relationship, because it is so shallow and seemingly perfect.”

Alex - “It’d be easy to create a version with a definitive answer and that’s not what we want, and that’s not what Shakespeare would have wanted. It’s a problem play, on a face level we have created a farce, a play with music, with fight scenes, slapstick, silly accents, men in drag, and lots of laughs. And this is great because we are taking a show to American schools, to some venues where students attend for credit and often walk out at the interval or spend the whole show on their phones. The way to get their attention was to make this show funny, bright, and loud. It sounds simple but it’s worked, I think. It’s not to patronise or to pitch beneath, but to work out your audience in advance and level it to them.”

Kennedy - “And as a result the misogyny is pushed back in the textures of the play, but it hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there, in a subtle way, but you have to search harder for it than you might in some productions.”

Laura - “And hopefully the audience will leave having laughed and having enjoyed the comedy on its face level, but they can look deeper and analyse further and see the misogyny there. We aren’t making these issues funny, but we are surrounding them with jokes and with comedy.”