New light on sex war

London audiences have had a valuable theatrical opportunity denied them for centuries. Gregory Doran's inspired juxtaposition of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed, now running in repertory together, enable us to see how the Elizabethan approval of male supremacy in marriage was challenged by the Puritan notion of sexual equality.

Fletcher's farce, written about 20 years after Shakespeare's Shrew and offering a radical riposte to it, is virtually unknown. In this Royal Shakespeare production of boisterous crudity and bouncing vitality, The Tamer seems deftly geared to the taste of lads, ladettes and lovers of stand-up comedy.

Fletcher, none too subtly weaving a plot and subplot of repetitive pointscoring, takes up the Petruchio story. The action centres upon this bully's defeat in the sexwar. After the death of his first wife, Katherine, Petruchio suffers a taming-process by her successor, Maria. Jasper Britton's Petruchio wields a whip, snarls and swaggers to keep his Dutch courage up, and succumbs to self-pity in a dynamic performance of relentless artificiality.

Fletcher's appealing vision of quasi-feminist women rampant and triumphant at the expense of smug, dejected males gives the play its energy and appeal. Alexandra Gilbreath's tough, raucous Maria, who employs the same affected over-emphatic diction as for her Katherine, leads a regiment of women with sister Livia and conspiratorial Bianca. Their ladies' parade, beating pots and pans as they sing "Lets all wear breeches" remarkably anticipates the spirit and costume-choice of early 20th century feminists.

The humiliations foisted upon Petruchio, which range from the Lysistratalike denial of sex and his imprisonment as a presumed plague victim, are characteristically enacted with broad, farcical glee. The brief glimpses of urination in public places, the male clutching of private parts (their own) and Britton's stand-up turn as a bemused husband affecting a chronic cough, indicate the production's low style.

At least Daniel Brocklebank's Rowland, miserably competing for Naomi Frederick's Livia with Christopher Godwin's dirty old-man suitor, provide a higher class of comic acting.

Until 6 March. Information: 020 7494 5040.

The Tamer Tamed