What do you do, in this sensitive age, with a play so extreme that the trigger warnings include racism, cannibalism, rape and self-harm? Even since Lucy Bailey’s celebrated Globe gore-fest in 2006, the impact of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy has changed. The answer, in Jude Christian’s brilliantly provocative close-up production, is to cast it with women and play it in travesty, with comic set pieces and songs pointing out, as the opening number has it, that this is “torture porn, but more artistic”.
Not a drop of stage blood is shed, but the illusion of horror grips as candles are snuffed out in lieu of lives in an increasingly farcical frenzy which begins with tapers being dashed to the floor and ends up with lumps of wax being ground up and fed into a liquidiser, before being served to the vengeful Gothic queen Tamora (Kirsten Foster) in the play’s infamous pie scene.
From the moment Lucy McCormick’s sleazeball of an emperor oozes on to the stage, it’s clear this is a patriarchy hellbent on self-destruction, with rows of heirs and spares scrapping on either side as the triumphant Titus marches back into Rome, and the spoils of war – women – are divided up. The characterisation is clear and to the point, with Tamora’s sons wrestling on the floor like a malevolent Tweedledee and Tweedledum, practising the violence they will later unleash, while Titus’s son Lucius sulks awkwardly around, gauchely mocking his father before his brothers’ murders force him to grow up.
For all the hilarious busyness, it’s a mark of the production’s intelligence that its two most shocking moments arise from the text itself. There’s an audible gasp as Tamora’s Moorish lover (owned by Kibong Tanji with a sexualised swagger) is dismissed to his face as “swart ... spotted, detested, and abominable”. A stunned silence greets the introduction of the mutilated Lavinia by her own uncle with the words “this was thy daughter”.
Katy Stephens’s Titus responds by dropping his leonine roaring and enfolding the sputtering Georgia-Mae Myers (who seems to be drowning in the blood from her severed tongue) with such tenderness that everything beyond them fades away. The suggestion here, as elsewhere, is that if anything can save us from ourselves, it is parental love, though human rapacity and delusion are such that it probably won’t. The show will not be to everyone’s taste (to mine, the modern parallels are laboured towards the end), but there is no doubting its invention and thoughtfulness.
At Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 15 April
