The first time Jo Clifford was asked to adapt The Taming of the Shrew, she hated the play so much she turned the commission down. It was right at the beginning of her career. “I wasn’t ready to do it then,” she says. So when the Sherman theatre’s artistic director Rachel O’Riordan approached her, she felt she had “unfinished business”.

When she was first asked, she says, “I was John Clifford, living as a man. Now I’m Jo Clifford, living as a woman.” It made sense to her for the characters in the play to go through a similar metamorphosis. Clifford’s version flips the characters’ genders and a forthcoming production at the RSC similarly locates the play in a matriarchal society. In Clifford’s version, Katherine is a man and Petruchio a woman in a world where male virtue is prized and women wield the power. “As a trans theatre-maker,” she says, “I understand that we need to rethink what it is to be a man, what it is to be a woman.” Shakespeare was also writing at a period of incredible change between men and women, she continues, and “part of the gorgeousness of his work is that he celebrates that”.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays explore the power dynamics between men and women but few do so as explicitly as The Taming of the Shrew. The relationship between Katherine and Petruchio, in which she is bartered then subjugated, has long been a source of consternation. This is a play of its time, of course, but also the one most concerned with how misogyny manifests itself. It remains one of his most performed plays, and lends itself to experimentation. Phyllida Lloyd cast Kathryn Hunter and Janet McTeer as Katherine and Petruchio in her all-female take at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003. There have also been all-male productions, including Propeller’s 2007 version directed by Edward Hall, which highlighted the cruelty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Problem play ... Kathryn Hunter and Janet McTeer in The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, in 2003. Photograph: Ferdaus Shamim/WireImage

The Taming of the Shrew is often labelled a “problem play”, but some of the biggest challenges it presents to an adapter are those of structure, says Clifford. “It’s three plays rolled into one.” The relationship between Petruchio and Katherine is clearly “what turned Shakespeare on,” she explains. “There’s a quality to these scenes that’s really exciting.” But there is also the Lucentio subplot and the introductory scenes with Christopher Sly. Audiences of his time enjoyed the comedy of these scenes, and Clifford can see why Shakespeare included them, but they feel as if they’ve been “smashed together”.

At the time Shakespeare was writing, English “had an energy and rawness to it,” says Clifford. “It hadn’t been worn out by centuries and exploration and imperialism.” Theatre was a new thing too, rather than a “marginalised form”. Theatre was “where it was at. It wasn’t drowned out by naturalism and all that shit.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jo Clifford performs in Eve at the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, in 2017. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Matt Gavan says that playing Katherine has presented him with challenges. Ultimately, she has no control and “that lack of agency is obviously an unusual situation to play as a male actor.” He explains that in the world of the play as imagined by Clifford and directed by Michael Fentiman, “the women are the powerbrokers, politicians and soldiers, so it’s them who have the war-like bearing, and we are boys who are objects of beauty, used to being looked at and not in control”. He thinks some of Katherine’s rage “comes from feeling not beautiful, from feeling awkward and undesirable and being angry at himself for being bothered by that. That torsion is fun to play with.”

Clifford hopes that scenes, such as the one in which a mother auctions her sons off like property, will be shocking in a way that they perhaps wouldn’t be if played in the conventional way. “Our sensibilities have been dulled – these are things we don’t think about because they’re part of the ordinary mundane injustices of our lives.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Claire Price and Joseph Arkley rehearse the RSC’s Taming of the Shrew. Photograph: Sam Allard/RSC

When Justin Audibert was offered the opportunity to direct the play by RSC artistic director Gregory Doran, he knew that he needed to find a new way into the text that addressed the way women were represented. “I have to be aware of the privilege I carry as a man and as the director,” he says.

He was tired of sitting in rooms where men got the main share of the lines – this was a way to address this issue, too. “I don’t think the world needs to see any more imagery of men abusing women. There’s plenty of that out there in pop culture and in society,” he says. “As an artist, you’re responsible for the stuff you put out in the world, and even if I wanted to show how horrifically Katherine is treated, I would still be putting that out there.” But, he says, flip the roles around and the play becomes a different animal. “You can’t do the play and not do the taming – this was a way of doing that.”

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In his version, “women control access to education, they control money – people talk about money all the time in this play – and male virginity is prized”. Audibert initially considered setting it in a parallel contemporary world, but “it felt like a bolder thing to set it in Shakespeare’s time. It allows us to make more of an allegorical comment on today’s society by going back into a factious past.” Amanda Harris, who plays Baptista, also starred in Lloyd’s all-female production and 25 years ago played the role of Katherine. “It’s not just women playing men’s parts; it shows up the absurdity,” she says.

Costume is central to this. “When I’ve played female characters in Shakespeare,” says Claire Price, who portrays Petruchia, “the corset isn’t a problem because women didn’t say much, whereas Petruchio says a lot, he hops from one thought to another – there’s no off switch. And all that’s got to be done in a corset and farthingale and a ruff.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Francois Pandolfo and Matt Gavan in rehearsals for The Taming of the Shrew at the Sherman theatre. Photograph: Mark Douet

“I know this play incredibly well,” she adds, “and always thought I’d play Katherine, but I know the part of Petruchio very well. As women, we study men; we have to. I know Petruchio’s motivations. I am playing him as a woman, not a man, so it has to be explored in a different way.” Her Petruchia is a soldier, she continues. “So we redefined the corset as a kind of armour, a status symbol. It has to be credible that Petruchia can use a sword and handle herself.”

What’s fascinating to Price is hearing “the language of power in the mouths of women.” It’s also fundamental to convey, adds Price, “that, in a patriarchy, the men are not free either – there are things they mustn’t be seen to do. They need to not lose their fortune, to manage their money.” The world they’re creating for this production is, she makes clear, not a utopia. “It’s just as complicated. Power is not freedom. There are freedoms that come with power but it’s not the same thing.”