Taming of the Shrew, Prague, 1978: Lenka Pichikova as Bianca; Dagmar Veskenova as Katherina.

Modern non-feminist productions are more willing to show Katherina's physical brutality openly, and question the script's supposed reduction of Kate to a zombie. This more positive reading figured in Gregory Doran's 2003 RSC production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, where the play was presented with Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed as a two-part piece, with Jasper Britton and Alexandra Gilbreath (playing both Katherina in The Shrew and Maria, Petruchio's second wife, in The Tamer Tamed) In this post-feminist context, Jack Belloli writes:

"With Petruchio making claims like “she is my goods, my chattel” and Katherine concluding the play with a speech which celebrates wifely obedience, it’s hard not to see the play as misogynistic. . . . Yet the play continues to strike readers and directors as more complicated: the submissive subject matter of Katherine’s final speech is undercut by the very fact that she’s allowed to speak at length at all. And, from the very start of the play, Shakespeare emphasises the artifice of the play’s world, raising questions over how seriously such matters should be taken. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare’s delight in plays-within-plays is taken to its extreme. It opens with an induction – often omitted by modern productions – in which drunken tinker Christopher Sly is made to believe that he is a lord and has the rest of the play performed before him." ("Open Shakespeare": Open Knowledge Foundation Project|(c) All material available by CC Attribution license v3.0)

Image from Wolkers Theatre, Prague, 1978. (See also first two images of this Gallery.) Source: Miroslav Tuma, by courtesy of the Yorck Project, by GNU Free Document License.