Obscure Shakespeares are like buses, you wait ages for one and then two come at once. From my first trip to a Shakespeare play in 1989 it took me 24 years to add
Titus Andronicus to my collection, but only three months after that the second production comes along. The best thing is, in dealing with a notoriously problematic play two different directors have used completely different approaches to its tonal difficulties.
Titus Andronicus is effectively Elizabethan torture porn - with non-stop bloodshed and sexual violence, a self-inflicted amputation straight out of
Saw, and a notorious LOLcannibalism! finale, its horror can tip over into unintentional comedy. One way to solve this is to embrace the play's extremes
like Michael Fentiman did in Stratford this summer. But another approach is to couch the horror in something we still find genuinely disturbing, and that's Zoé Ford's take at the Arcola.
