FOUR STARS

"But must my sons be slaughter’d in the streets/For valiant doings in their country’s cause?” The heartfelt plea by Tamora, Queen of the Goths (Katy Stephens) on behalf of the soldier Alarbus (Nicholas Prasad) took on an almost uncanny relevance at last Thursday’s press night for Titus Andronicus in the light of events in Woolwich on the previous day. So, too, did her exclamation “O cruel, irreligious piety!” once she learned that her words had failed to persuade Titus (Stephen Boxer) to spare the boy. “Let’s hew his limbs,” gloated the obdurate Roman general’s son Lucius (Matthew Needham) as he prepared for the sacrifice.

None present could have doubted the topicality of this compelling revival of a work seen so rarely on the Stratford stages that one suspects it is an embarrassment. In this connection, it might be recalled the RSC’s 1981 production (the one before last) came on a double bill with The Two Gentlemen of Verona — two unpopular early plays disposed of in one go.

The director Michael Fentiman, in an impressive debut with the RSC, makes a powerful case for the play’s value as entertainment, with the grimly comic side to proceedings emphasised throughout. So gleefully in-yer-face are the gory events depicted that comparison is invited with Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days, as created by the Monty Python team.

Intransigence over Alarbus’s fate proves to be Titus’s ‘big mistake’ once Tamora — by now married to the merrily doltish emperor Saturninus (John Hopkins) — is able to wreak vengeance. Spurred on by their mother’s malevolent lover Aaron (Kevin Harvey), the new empress’s teenage tearaway sons Demetrius (Perry Millward) and Chiron (Jonny Weldon) rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter Lavinia (Rose Reynolds) and murder her husband, the emperor’s brother Bassianus (Richard Goulding).

In a richly comic scene (amazing in the circumstances!) Titus, his son Lucius and Tribune brother Marcus (Richard Durden) argue over who shall offer his severed arm to Saturninus in a bid to save the lives of Titus’s sons Martius (Ciarán Owens) and Quintus (Joe Bannister), whom Aaron has framed for the murder. Titus ‘wins’, and receives their heads for his pains.

All steadily builds to the notorious climactic banquet at which Titus — here hilariously dressed as a Lyon’s Cornerhouse nippy — serves Tamora with meat patties containing her butchered sons. The “great tumult” demanded in a stage note duly follows, with a carefully choreographed display of silent-movie-style Grand Guignol to chirpy music (composer Tom Mills) performed in jaunty style by a seven-strong brass-led band.

Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Until October 26
0844 800 1110
rsc.org.uk