Thunderflashes, lots of simulated sexual intercourse, thudding post-Elizabethan house music, lines delivered at 140 beats per minute... come on, you know where we are. It has to be the RSC, doing its familiar and well-loved Carry on Shakespeare routine. And thoroughly enjoyable it is, too. Hell, where else in the clenched-buttocked world of theatreland can you wallow in three hours’ worth of joyous, unrepentant misogyny and snigger along to racist jokes of the type unseen since Love Thy Neighbour disappeared from our television screens? What we have here is a performance of such unrestrained energy and bravura that, for a moment, it is possible to forget what you are watching. I think that’s probably a good thing, on balance. Actors hurtle onto the stage from five corners, do their stuff very quickly indeed, with much mugging, gurning and jokes that had clearly never occurred to old Bill, then hurtle off again, presumably for a few amphetamines. There is dancing; there is music; there is cacophony.

Conall Morrison’s production of The Taming of the Shrew works well because this mayhem is meticulously choreographed, and the impressive cast - youngish, in the main, and previously untested in at least one case - somehow possess the chutzpah to bring it off. Green Wing’s Michelle Gomez as a screeching, splenetically unpleasant Kate, in need of urgent chastisement, even allows room for a little subtlety of performance. That final long soliloquy, on the need for women to subordinate themselves to the superior judgment of men, may not have commended itself to, say, Harriet Harman or Germaine Greer, but Gomez spoke the words as if she almost agreed with them. You can’t ask for much more than that.

There is not much scope for subtlety in the character of Petruchio, but Stephen Boxer carries it off with a laconic arrogance and rather neat comic timing. Elsewhere, there is a delightful debut from Amara Karan as the modest ingénue Bianca, whom everybody wants to shag. Even Bianca, mind, gets a bit lippy at one point, although this trait is swiftly expunged after a good seeing-to from Patrick Moy’s fine Lucentio, in a bawdy set piece that lacked only the cackling presence of that excellent comic actor Mr Sidney James. There is a fine turn, too, from Larrington Walker - who, as a Jamaican-inflected merchant with a swaggering ghetto walk, almost steals the show.

Most of the stuff that gets the audience rolling about is modern emendation. Elizabethan England would have been bemused by Walker’s Kingston patois and Keir Charles’s approximations of Ali G as an unconventional Tranio; still, this knockabout stuff is rather more in keeping with the spirit of the original than the overwrought, overthought and confused versions I used to see when radical femi-nism was at its height in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Back then, theatre companies put on the play only if it could be soused in irony or interpreted in such a way as to mean precisely the opposite of what Shakespeare intended. Done head on, for belly laughs, it suddenly seems to possess a rather touching humanity, paradoxically - even though its sentiments may not necessarily accord with our own. In the programme notes, there is a lengthy peroration on misogyny from the writer Deborah Cameron - the equivalent of one of those grave health warnings you find on the front of a packet of cigarettes. Smoking Will Destroy You, Your Family and the Entire World, and so on. But still we smoke.

And the play itself? Well, it has a ludicrous and inexplicable plot; I cannot imagine much will come of it. Apparently, it is one of the playwright’s first works, so perhaps we can hope for better in the future.

Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon

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