The Tamer Tamed, Queen's Theatre, London

From the back-stage bickering of Kiss Me Kate to the high-school hissy-fits of Ten Things I Hate About You, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has inspired many a spin-off. But the earliest and, in many respects, the boldest of these is the least well known. That is, until now. Joining his superlative account of The Shrew at the Queen's Theatre (where the two productions will play in tandem), Gregory Doran's uproarious RSC revival of John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed blasts the dust of neglect off this spirited 1611 riposte to the supposed chauvinism of Shakespeare's original drama.

It's a fluent, shrewd, robustly comic "sequel" that places the boot firmly on the other foot. Reeking of early 17th-century London (Padua conveniently forgotten), this city comedy catches up with Petruchio just as he is tying the knot for the second time. Kate, it appears, died young, after a marriage evidently as tempestuous as the courtship. The mild-seeming Maria is his new bride and you sense that this is a love-match. But almost 20 years separate the writing of the two plays and Maria has higher expectations of a partner than Kate. She wants a fully companionate marriage, based on due equality and mutual respect. To force Petruchio into submission, she needs to give him a fierce taste of his own medicine. With shades of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the women barricade themselves away and join forces in a sex strike.

Alexandra Gilbreath's witty, mettlesome beauty Maria is aglow with militant purpose. Her tactic is aversion therapy, putting Petruchio through a course of humiliations similar to those he visited on her predecessor. Jasper Britton looks as though he's been hit by a convoy of tanks when she calls his bluff of pretending to be ill by having him locked up as a plague victim.

His is a brilliantly funny performance. Frankie Howerd himself would have envied the exquisite timing of the routine where this Petruchio, appealing for sympathy to the audience, practises chronic, stalls-drenching coughs to use in his sickbed stunt. But the portrayal also has psychological depth, admirably hinting at the troubled sensitive man who needs to be rescued from his own defensively protracted and now not-so-convinced laddishness.

Though the subplot is a bit tiresome, there's not a weak link in this extraordinarily strong and characterful company. Fletcher's play is responding to the coarse conventional idea of Shakespeare's Shrew, not the humane interpretation Doran offers here, so there's a thought-provoking discontinuity in this double bill. When, in The Tamer Tamed, the women let rip in an ecstatic clog-clattering, pot-banging dance, their rebellious joy is so infectious that you'd have to be neuter not to want to join in.

To 6 March (0870 890 1110)