When the martial drums sound a tattoo at the end of the first half of Michael Fentiman’s RSC revival, it may not be by happenstance that the rhythm they beat out is that of the sport-hooligan chant “You’re going home in a fucking ambulance”. We have, after all, just seen the title character’s daughter raped on the corpse of her murdered husband then butchered of her hands and tongue to prevent her identifying her assailants; Titus then cuts off his own hand in a vain attempt to ransom back his sons, and after the interval will bake the rapists and murderers in a pie which he serves to their mother and Roman emperor stepfather. By the end of Fentiman’s production, there cannot be enough ambulances in the greater Rome metropolitan area to clear up the stage.
    
Elizabethan/Jacobean revenge tragedies generally have Tarantinoesque body counts; Hamlet is the apotheosis of the genre, but Titus Andronicus is, despite its Senecan sources and its (largely) Shakespearean authorship, much nearer the unsubtle average. The Tarantino analogy is also an apt one in that such plays utilise self-conscious black humour. Fentiman and his Titus, Stephen Boxer, work this beautifully. In the play’s great rhetorical set-piece, when the grief-maddened Titus expostulates on the killing of a fly, Boxer slaps his remaining hand to his forehead in a “D’oh!” gesture before realising he has rubbed the dead fly into his hair; in the final banquet scene he turns up in cook/housemaid drag, exploiting like Hamlet mistaken notions of his insanity.
    
Boxer has almost uniformly strong support. Katy Stephens is in prime villainous mode as empress Tamora, with John Hopkins callow and haughty as her duped husband. Rose Reynolds meets the challenge to be eloquent rather than annoying as the wordlessly whimpering Lavinia. The weakest link is Kevin Harvey as Tamora’s Moorish henchman/lover Aaron; he may one day have a voice as rich as Boxer’s, but here he keeps pitching it in an undertone which verges on unintelligibility. All in all, though, Fentiman successfully squares the revenge-tragedy circle: he maximises the gore and refuses to stint on laughs yet makes these strains complement the drama rather than undermining it. Now, if the RSC would tackle the even wackier Atheist’s Tragedy…

Written for the Financial Times.