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.