Titus Andronicus: a 'beautiful, blood-soaked nightmare'

"It is not just heads that roll in Shakespeare's bloodiest drama," said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Prisoners are dismembered; a woman is raped, and her tongue cut out; hands are cut off and bodies mutilated "until they are mere meat, then cooked and fed to loved ones". In director Max Webster's superb production, his first for the RSC, all this, and more, is handled with chilling brilliance.

No specific contemporary parallels are drawn, but the design evokes modern-day torture chambers from Bagram and Guantanamo to Syria and Iran. Blood ebbs into a grilled gutter, and "hi-tech torture equipment, suspended from pulleys, is brought on and off the stage" – the sight of which makes the skin crawl. But for all its blood-letting, "Titus" is a play that also "glitters with poetic richness" – and this production boasts a "sublime" performance in the title role from Simon Russell Beale, which captures all of the character's facets. Both statesman and warrior, this Titus is brutal and yet humane.

Beale brings "poignancy and lyricism" to a "beautiful, blood-soaked nightmare" of a staging, agreed Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. At 64, the actor is a generation older than Brian Cox was when he gave a career-best performance in the role for the RSC in 1987. Age brings a drop in "martial machismo", but in its place, Beale's Titus has a frail, elder-statesman dignity that is "remorselessly shredded" as the play unfolds. Beale "beautifully charts Titus's journey from self-containment to man wildly undone, to the point of madness". And he leads a strong cast, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. Emma Fielding is commanding as Marcia, Titus's sister (gender-flipped from the original), and Natey Jones is outstanding as Aaron the Moor.

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I found this staging too "polite", said Dominic Maxwell in The Times – the violence too stylised to be truly frightening. The Bard's first and bloodiest tragedy is "brutal and bananas"; here it feels neat, considered. Still, there is great skill and imagination on display, and though I'd have liked Beale's Titus to be more martial, he remains "as supremely watchable and outstandingly lucid as ever".

Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until 7 June