Dealing with the dark side

The RSC follow their season-opening damp squib Merchant of Venice with an explosive version of The Taming of the Shrew.

The problems with this least politically correct of Shakespeare's plays have been well rehearsed.

How does a director deal with the in-your-face misogynistic thrust of the play? Well, it's a farce, isn't it?

Do we really have to take the Punch and Judy knock-about cavortings seriously?

Conall Morrison gives his production the full farcical treatment in a frenetically energetic, modern commedia production. From the opening moment, when the stage erupts with a revelling crowd of fancy-dressed boyos, like some football supporters' gang descending on an unsuspecting foreign venue, the action drives on its high-decibel way.

But Morrison has recognised that Shakespeare was about more than a knees-up romp. Stephen Boxer's sexually frustrated tinker Christopher Sly hovers impotently on the skirts of the crowd.

When later transmuted into the wife-taming Petruchio in a touring fringe theatre company's play, he seizes his chance to indulge his sadism.

It isn't slapstick violence when he virtually throttles his hapless servant, nor is it quite the fun that some in the audience took it for when he forces the servant to kiss Michelle Gomez's crushed Katherina.

Boxer plays the tamer with evident pleasure in the pain and humiliation that he inflicts on Gomez. When, at the climax of the play, she delivers her submission speech, instructing wives how they should treat their husbands as masters, she is a broken doll.

The triumphant Petruchio prepares to rape his victim, only to be dragged away, stripped and left with the recognition that the play is over - real life is not a theatrical self-indulgence.

The acting throughout is superb, with a particularly tour de force performance from Keir Charles as Tranio, who speaks in a marvellous mix of spaghetti Italian and estuary English.

The overall vivacity and comic surface of Morrison's production will win most audiences, even those who read its darker underlying message.

Plays in repertoire until September 25. Box office: 0844-800-1110.