The Taming of the Shrew, Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea University

Anyone who has attended the Shakespeare Schools Festival at Taliesin (in which young people perform half-hour versions of the Bard's classic works) will know The Taming of the Shrew is always a popular choice due to its "battle of the sexes" theme, and the fact that it can be readily adapted to a contemporary setting.

Trinity College's School of Theatre and Performance's own adaptation of this rumbustious comedy opened splendidly, with a raucous hen night scene played out in a pub, complete with a male stripper — but once the introduction was over, it was back to the formal text, which jarred with what we had already seen. The performances — from an all-female cast, save for the uncredited token male — were uniformly good, though I felt that director Michael Dyer could have done a little more to integrate the visual aspect with the dialogue. Rachel Swenn's Katherine was not so much shrewish as petulant, but the chemistry between her and Maisie Mcintosh as the leather-clad Petruchio kept the audience engrossed.

The use of pre-filmed inserts was an inventive touch, as was the climactic finale in which Katherine performed a gutsy karaoke version of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive.

It seemed a shame that the play itself did not quite fulfil the dramatic potential that it should have. For all that, it is good to see young people rising to the challenge of performing Shakespeare, and demonstrating they understand the complexities of the text.