"People like Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane invented their own way of doing it and saying it. And the re-examination of Shakespeare on stage in adaptations and re-workings is vital in adding our tuppence worth to an ongoing debate. My first play was inspired by an idea in Taming of the Shrew, that a 'woman moved is like a fountain troubled, muddy, ill-seeming, thick and bereft of beauty'. I even included and adapted a Shakespearean monologue. We're not about that anymore. Now, I have to tell my story, or other stories as I, or my collaborators and I see it. I think the baton always has to be passed and voices and stories must keep coming, so I set up Untamed Shrew Theatre to question and explore my responses to the world as I find it now, to question the way it is in a new century. Where does a feminine feminist playwright sit in all this now?".

 Victoria Grainger ~ Writer and founder of Untamed Shrew Productions ~ "We should never feel polite in the theatre'

Shrew History

A Birmingham writer, born and raised in the 'Tolkien country' of Hall Green, Victoria Grainger is a female playwright who writes with a classical awareness, but with a distinctive, contemporary voice.  

She worked for Stafford's Heart Productions for playwright Frank Bramwell for four years as a director and script-editor. She has a B.A in Literature from the Open University, and a Masters Degree in Shakespeare and Theatre from the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

The Shakespearean allusion to Taming of the Shrew in the 'Untamed' of the Shrew Productions is intended to signify the inherently female perspective she brings to the work, but also fundamentally the revolutionary role theatre and new work should play, similar to the contentious attitude Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries displayed in the creation of their work when language and literacy were becoming more widely available than ever before.

"Words were not to be held aloft above the heads of most, and although can appear extravagant now were vital and crucial in the communication of ideas in social arenas, and in 'holding up the mirror' and painting life through words on the stage. They always should be. We should never laugh or applaud and allow something we haven't understood or felt privy to, just because to confess otherwise might mean we don't appear as intellectually astute as our audibly appreciative neighbours. Theatre should always wound us and leave us winded emotionally. We should never feel polite in the theatre". 

Increasingly working in collaboration with theatrical, visual and musical artists, the focus is always on personal, emotional stories that are crafted to reflect the wider sphere of a more epic context. Using a mix of fact and fiction to explore the minutiae of the human condition, the spirit of Untamed Shrew is increasingly concerned with the creation of passionate and exploratory new work, investigating performative possibilities and in terms of writing, incorporating the idiosyncrasies of the resident writer, inspired by the distinctive attributes and visions of her collaborators, to maintain a distinctly and resolutely 'froward' ethos.