RUNNING through Shakespeare’s early comedy is a thread of gratuitous cruelty disguised as knock-about fun.

This is admittedly offset by the fight-back of the spirited Katharina against the unconventional wooing by her domineering “tamer,” the fortune-seeking Petruchio, and it's a relationship which ends uneasily in most modern productions with the scene where true love questionably emerges, or in an ironic submission where Kate tellingly humiliates her macho persecutor.

Seizing the #MeToo moment, Justin Audibert’s production copes with the ambiguities with clean-sweep  gender-swapping. Petruchio becomes Claire Price’s fiery red-headed virago Petruchia and Joseph Arkley her somewhat spineless victim. He's oddly named Katherine, possibly the reason for his temperamental tantrums.

Kate’s favoured sister Bianca becomes her younger brother (a Kenny Everett-like James Cooney), while his elderly suitor Grumio is transformed into the grimacing Gremia, who glides about the stage like some matronly battleship determined to win her young prize in a show-stealing performance from Sophie Stanton.

 The energetic acting, period setting, Hannah Clark’s sumptuous costumes and Ruth Chan’s music save what must have seemed a clever directorial decision.

But despite the text being cut to suit the purpose, the play fights back. As Petruchia manhandles, starves and reduces her reluctant intended, there is little humour and no sense of a growing bond of understanding between one of the Bard’s most troubled and troublesome couples.

Runs until August 31, then tours: details: rsc.org