When you cast an actor of a different sex in a given role, you may change expectations of that performance, but you don’t alter the relationships in the play. That happens when you change the sex of an actual character. And when you do that with virtually every character, you remake the world in which the play’s action takes place. When doing this, it may help to have some idea how you’ll be changing that world.

Justin Audibert’s RSC Taming Of The Shrew (which, after its current Stratford run, will be one of three plays in a repertoire tour in the autumn) flips virtually everyone apart from a few menial characters around Petruchia, as s/he now is. In terms of performance, it works all right, although there are some decisions I would question; conceptually, I’m not persuaded it has the first idea what it’s after, other than a vague attitude of “suck it and see”.

All right, so this is a matriarchal world. Women wield domestic, financial and temporal power and carry swords, yet still wear the kind of farthingaled gowns that would make swordplay impracticable; Petruchia, however, ditches her gown for doublet and hose at her wedding, because otherwise the description of her crazy apparel would require rewriting from the ground up rather than mere tinkering with pronouns. Men give frequent, vain flicks of their well-shampooed locks, but no amount of tonsorial product will make Kate’s claim (it’s a hard name to masculinise) in his climactic submission speech that “our bodies [are] soft and weak and smooth” remotely plausible, much less in the particular case of the slim yet buff Joseph Arkley as Kate himself.

“Katherine the curst” could easily be played in a version like this as a textbook case of testosterone overdose, yet Audibert and Arkley rein Kate way back. He has a handful of outbursts, but almost all of them occur only when he has been goaded beyond endurance; by and large, the designation “shrew” seems almost arbitrary. Perhaps this is part of the point, but in contrast with Claire Price’s untrammelled Petruchia it seems unintentionally to preserve the misogynistic perspective.

As I say, the performances themselves are often strong. James Cooney as Katherine’s brother Bianco is appealingly narcissistic, and Laura Elsworthy as Trania seems at times, when impersonating her mistress Lucentia, to be channelling the “Whoof!” gestures of Blackadder’s Lord Flashheart. Praise above all for Sophie Stanton as Gremia, engaging throughout in good old-fashioned scene-stealing, not least with a running gag about being unable to get her sword out of its scabbard.

In the end, though, it does little if anything to make the bias of the play more noticeable than it already is to a modern-day audience. Ultimately you have to make a submission of your own, to the idea that this is a world with its own rules and inconsistencies... the consequence of which is that it has no meaningful connection with ours.

Written for the Financial Times.