Titus Andronicus
The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
★★★★

GIVEN the fact that Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy, after its initial success, disappeared from the stage for 300 years, its revival since the mid-20th century must reflect something about our contemporary world.

History has always been violent but as far as most people not directly involved are concerned that’s exactly what it is, history. Today, however, we see and experience that violence in all its horror virtually as it happens through daily television news.

The ageing Titus returning in triumph to Rome with his defeated Gothic captives finds himself embroiled in the elections for a new emperor. Rejecting the offered imperial diadem, he disastrously supports the claims of the resentful Saturninus, the eldest son of the deceased emperor who, in reluctant gratitude, suggests he marry his daughter Lavinia. When, against Titus’ agreement, she is claimed by Bassianus, the new Emperor’s brother previously betrothed to her, Saturninus marries Tamora the captive Gothic Queen, who is set upon destroying the Andronici family.  

This opens the way to a carnival of carnage.

Max Webster’s production resembles a dramatised horror comic, moving from scene to scene with each one depicting a fresh torture for characters and, perhaps, some unsuspecting members of the audience.

Tamora’s Moor lover, Aaron, plans for her two sons to murder Bassianus, pinning the blame on two of Titus’s sons. The murderers rape and mutilate Lavinia, cutting out her tongue and severing her hands to prevent her revealing the truth. He then persuades Titus to chop off his own hand to save his sons’ lives.

And so the litany of physical and mental anguish continues through to Titus’s grotesquely inventive bloodbath revenge.

Simon Russell Beale, returning to Stratford after nine years, provides impressive ballast to this uneven roller coaster of a play. This Titus is no Lear, but Russell Beale conveys both the bewildered agony of his response to this “wilderness of tigers” and holds his own for the absurdist tragi-comic finale of serving up to Tamora her own sons baked in a pie.

Apart from Natey Jones’s Aaron, a kind of joyful epitome of evil, and Wendy Kweh’s manipulative and malicious Tamora (she even continues eating after the cannibalistic nature of Titus’ banquet is revealed), the rest of the young cast are less at home with the play’s rhetorical language.

Max Webster periodically moves events from all-too-realistic action into a darkly choreographed world of weirdly slithering jungle creatures full of threatening cries.

While Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare makes its audience live through the obscenity of human cruelty, one wonders whether audiences leaving the theatre register more than a play?

Runs until June 27: Box Office: 01789 333111, rsc.org.uk