On a good night, there is little to admire about Shakespeare’s Shrew, a misogynistic, creaky old play with two plot strands that don’t hang particularly well together. Unfortunately, the Novello is not hosting a good night.

The fashion in recent years has been for productions to sweeten the unrelentingly abominable behaviour of Petruchio towards his new wife Katherina by suggesting that her ultimate and complete submission is, in fact, happy collusion. The couple, these productions suggest, are indulging in a bizarre kind of foreplay and will melt happily into a rosy Paduan sunset.

Director Conall Morrison, though, holds no truck with any kind of conscience-easing melting. Michelle Gomez’s Kate is, by the time she places her hand under her husband’s foot, utterly subjugated and humiliated, walking and talking like an automaton. It does make one wonder why this talented actress chose the most thankless role in Shakespeare to make her RSC debut.

Stone Age gender politics aside, the rest of this production is a tiresome grind. Morrison gives us the endless Induction, often (understandably) omitted, in which the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is persuaded to watch a play. This is peculiarly presented as a raucous present-day stag party, with Gomez and Amara Karan, who plays Kate’s beauteous sister Bianca, dressed as hookers.

Sly (Stephen Boxer) then morphs into nuptial bounty hunter Petruchio, who in fact sports huge stag’s antlers at his own wedding, and the action veers off into an uncomfortably slapstick past.

The exhaustingly hammy acting is a cheap trick, seemingly deployed to absolve the director of responsibility for examining any tricky textual issue. Why, for instance, is not a single iambic pentameter expended on hazarding a motive for Kate’s shrewishness? Why are all the women characterised as little more than chattels?

To see this play’s general clash-of-the-sexes idea in a form that actually works, I heartily suggest waiting for a production of Much Ado About Nothing.
Until 7 March (0844 482 5135, www.rsc.org.uk)