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SAN FRANCISCO – William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” an Elizabethan slapstick comedy about a husband who uses physical and emotional abuse to train his wife to be submissive and dutiful, is a tough play for 21st century audiences. 

But England’s Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) brought a crisp and comedic touring production of the play to the Bay Area Thursday for an 11-day run, mounting the play with a concept that fits modern sensibilities. 

RSC’s device is to include in the staging Shakespeare’s introductory scene to the play that is omitted in most productions. 

In this introductory scene, a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly is found passed out in the street by some gentlemen who decide to play a practical joke by taking him home and installing him in the bedroom of a fine house. 

When Sly wakes up, he is told by servants that he is the master of the house who has been in a coma for 15 years. A male servant dressed as a woman pretends to be his wife. 

When this infrequently staged introductory scene is used in productions, the body of the play “Taming of the Shrew” is then performed for the confused, deluded and dazed Christopher Sly as an entertainment by some actors who are in on the joke. 

In the current RSC production, the introductory Christopher Sly scene is performed in modern dress. 

Looking for some way out of his confusion, Sly goes to a computer at the side of the stage, logs onto the web, as though looking for a chat room – maybe a porn chat room – and finds the story of “Shrew,” which is staged in traditional costumes and time period. 

So the performance of “Shrew” then is seen as an anti-social web site which makes a sarcastic joke of conjugal politics and love. This context works fairly well as a justification for the production. 

In the basic story of “Shrew,” fortune-hunting bachelor Petruchio agrees to marry the angry, people-hating Katherine in exchange for a sizable dowry from her father. 

Petruchio is encouraged in his plan by several suitors of Katherine’s younger beautiful sister Bianca, because the father won’t permit Bianca to marry until his older Katherine is married first. 

Director Lindsay Posner’s production is a silly cartoon version of the story, played at times with a high-speed pace and herky-jerky movements that have the look and feel of low-speed video transmitted over the Web. 

There are some nice touches. Servants and masters are an important part of “Taming of the Shrew.” In this production the servants are often smart, though they have to be careful not to show it or they get beaten. 

This element is significant in a story about a husband taming a wife until she is his servant. 

Lucentio (Jo Stone-Fewings), a suitor to younger sister Bianca (Charlotte Randle), is outwitted at times by his smarter servant Tranio, played by Louis Hilyer in a funny, intelligent, devious, and quick-witted performance. 

As a determined, explosive Petruchio, Stuart McQuarrie’s high-speed courtship of Kate takes about 10 minutes from first meeting to a setting of the wedding date a week later. 

Beginning his serious assault on Kate’s mind, body and being, he shows up for the wedding wearing a dress. It is a funny performance. 

Monica Dolan plays a poisonous, sociopathic Kate, with a huge chip on her shoulder and an anger so deep that it gives her a crooked posture. Her inwardly directed rage paradoxically makes the character seem small at times. 

Lucentio’s second servant Biondello (Ryan Pope) is very funny with a rapid movement performance like a cartoon stick figure. 

Director Posner runs the show and the dialogue fast. Sometimes the speed of the physical comedy costs the production laughs that it normally gets when the characters are more real and less cartoony. 

The orchestration of Petruchio’s torture of Kate in his house after their marriage is communicated by nice touches that show how the servants are in cahoots with Petruchio. 

In the context of the brutality of this story, the first kiss between Petruchio and Kate is pornographic in its emotions. 

The silences at the end of “Shrew,” as surprised friends and family try and process what they have just witnessed, are hilarious. 

Designer Ashley Martin-Davis has framed the play’s action in a rectangle that implies it is a story told on a computer screen. 

The cavernous, echoing Herbst Theater isn’t the best place acoustically for a play. At times the performers aren’t easy to hear or understand. 

The Kate in this production comes to her submission to Petruchio not from love, but like a prisoner who learns that deception is a necessary survival technique in her relationship with a jailer. Kate becomes a Stepford wife, living dazed in a brutalized trance. 

At this production’s very end, a sleeping Christopher Sly is dumped drunk onto the street, where he wakes to consider his “brave dream,” in which he was Petruchio. Actor McQuarrie plays both roles. 

RSC’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” hosted by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, runs through July 2 at the Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. For tickets and information, call (415) 392-4400.