Theatre review: Titus Andronicus (RSC / Swan)

There's splashguards for the front row of the Swan and grates have been installed on the voms to drain off a variety of bodily fluids, it must mean Titus Andronicus is back at the theatre where I first saw it. This time, a few decades after Actor Brian Cox famously advised him to play the role, it's finally Simon Russell Beale's turn to take on the Roman General who finds out to his (and his family's) cost that the trouble with hanging out with mad emperors is that they're mad, and also they've got the power of emperors. Titus is given the casting vote on who should be the next autocrat of Rome, and chooses Saturninus (Joshua James,) who instantly decides to abuse his power by demanding the hand (in marriage) of Lavinia (Letty Thomas,) his own brother's (Ned Costello) fiancée. When she refuses, her whole family are considered to have offended his honour, and as he's her father that instantly takes Titus from kingmaker to pariah.

But the biggest problem is his second choice of empress: Tamora, queen of the Goths (Wendy Kweh) has just been defeated in battle and brought back as a prisoner of war, and Titus has sacrificed her eldest son to the gods, mostly out of spite. Now she's the most powerful woman in Rome, she promises she won't take revenge. Honest, like.

Shakespeare's most notorious bloodbath is essentially a series of increasingly elaborate setpieces in which Titus and Tamora kill or maim each other's children in a tit for tat campaign. It's a tragedy that fast devolves into farce, but Max Webster's production is determined to at least start off by taking things seriously: In a modern-day conflict soundtracked by fighter planes and helicopters, no specific real world references are made but there's certainly something Putin-like about SSRB's grey-suited Titus.

Both he and his son Lucius (Joel MacCormack) have a kind of dead-eyed detachment to the way they dispense violence at the start of the play, and to me this production feels like it's about that arc in the title character: Absolutely steeped in blood, he's lost dozens of sons in war but has taken that in his stride as a sacrifice made for honour, and can't relate that loss to the casual cruelty he's able to dole out. But when things become personal he's finally on the receiving end of the senseless kind of loss he's often helped cause. Not that he actually learns any lesson from this, obviously, it's Titus Andronicus.

Webster is committed to making this a gradual build of violence, with the initial sacrifice taking place offstage, and even cutting out Titus' murder of one of his own remaining sons. When the blood does start to pour the murders are still done in an abstract way, with the killer miming the action from a distance and gore being poured onto the victim either by another cast member or a tube hidden in the set (the fact that the method varies means I never quite found this a satisfyingly consistent device.)

The other major anti-naturalistic theme in the production is movement director Jade Hackett having the ensemble perform scene changes while bounding around the stage like a pack of dogs, building up the idea of the wild animals under the surface of suits and politics. Again, it's an idea with mixed results, sometimes chilling, sometimes used a bit clumsily as dead bodies judder back to life and furniture gets moved around through the gift of dance.

The turning point in the production comes in the famous moment when Titus laughs at his own misfortune, after which the action tips over into grand guignol. Both SSRB and Kweh use this as a recurring motif, both continuing to giggle occasionally as their actions and their consequences get increasingly mad. An increasingly camp element comes into play as Chiron (Marlowe Chan-Reeves) and Demetrius (Jeremy Ang Jones) meet their demise in leather bondage harnesses; Kweh later takes a few extra bites of the resulting pie even when she knows what's in it. Well, any pie in a crisis.

Aaron the Moor is regularly the show-stealing character, and while there's still a lot of fun to be had in his gleeful villainy and role as the mastermind behind Tamora's plots, Natey Jones does find a bit more depth to him as well, reminding us that while Shakespeare's creation is unarguably based on racist stereotypes, he does also give him pretty much the closest anyone in this play gets to a redemptive arc as he becomes fiercely protective of his son. He still gets a laugh out of the archetypal Yo Mama joke, of course.

Emma Fielding makes Titus' sister Marcia less the voice of wisdom and reason, more another detached voice goading the violence on from the sidelines. With Thomas' Lavinia also highlighting the character's own harshness and bigotry, even the most maligned and sympathetic character doesn't get a pass on being very much a part of the world she falls victim to.

So maybe Webster and SSRB have succeeded in their attempt to find meaning in a play that might simply be the Elizabethan equivalent of a Saw movie: Here the punishment for perpetuating a world of detached cruelty is not only to become a victim of it but for that suffering to become a joke. Despite Joanna Scotcher's set ending up as slippery with blood as its marble temple / abattoir look might suggest, this doesn't feel like a production that entirely lets itself go, which means while good it's not my favourite. It's still good enough to get the kind of rapturous applause that says an audience's expectations have been exceeded, and in the gift shop afterwards people were checking out the DVDs of Blanche McIntyre's 2017 production: So it continues to be my experience that when you've seen a good Titus you immediately want to see another.

Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare is booking until the 7th of June at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.