"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.
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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".
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