'Titus Andronicus' review — Shakespeare's tragic gorefest becomes a powerful play for today

Read our review of Titus Andronicus, starring John Hodgkinson, now in performances at the Hampstead Theatre to 11 October.

Summary

• The Royal Shakespeare Company's acclaimed production comes to the Hampstead Theatre
• Max Webster's revival offers salient lessons about the horror of unchecked vengeance
• John Hodgkinson replaces Simon Russell Beale in this excellent cast

The Hampstead Theatre, usually a new writing home except for their annual Tom Stoppard revival at Christmas, delivers the goods with Titus Andronicus, and against the odds as well. The Royal Shakespeare Company production has arrived in north London having lost its venerated leading man, Simon Russell Beale. But the show must go on, and John Hodgkinson – the busy character actor remembered for his fine work in plays like The Ferryman and Hangmen – has stepped bravely and capably into the title role.

Although this tall, distinguished-seeming actor couldn’t be less like his predecessor, Hodgkinson’s game appropriation of this astonishing part has enabled the continuation of a production that owes a lot of its success to an ace supporting cast. The play itself is widely known as a gorefest, its unrelieved savagery mitigated by a gallows humour that finds Titus, amidst the gathering carnage, fretting about the parentage of a fly that has been killed. Here, as elsewhere, Titus seems preparatory to King Lear, which of course contains its own vaunted commentary about flies, gods, and the relation between them.

That duality is well captured by Max Webster, this show’s quasi-ubiquitous director (he has the West End transfer of The Importance of Being Earnest with Stephen Fry opening shortly), who jolts spectators forward in their seats as various limbs get lopped off. Titus himself sheds a hand, only for nervous laughter to accompany the appearance late on of Rape and Murder as the attendants of Revenge – the scenario so over-the-top whilst simultaneously on the nose that you have to smile at the brazen bravura of it all.

Yet in a political climate given over these days on multiple fronts to vengeance, the abiding preposterousness of the play is perhaps less of an issue than before. Lucius (Joel MacCormack), Titus’s son who survives against the odds, takes charge at the end as some sort of agent of healing, and I for one found myself willing this initially tentative witness to horror the strength to endure.

Most of the production’s briskly paced action consists of the weird, wily machinations that lead inevitably to carnage, the bloodletting here stylishly achieved without necessitating any of the head counts that have accompanied this title in the past, as one playgoer after another has been carted out in distress. (I’ll never forget Brian Cox in the brilliant RSC / Deborah Warner production of old, remaining on stage during the interval, his gathering psychosis quite the contrast to the interval ice creams.)

And because Hodgkinson commands the production without quite transmitting a leading man’s charisma, the acting spoils fall even more evidently to such supporting players as Wendy Kweh’s seemingly game-for-anything Tamora, the queen of the Goths, and the always-welcome Max Bennett as Tamora’s husband, Saturninus, who seems to get progressively more unhinged the more his costumes are unbuttoned.

Tamora’s clandestine lover, Aaron, is beautifully taken by Ken Nwosu, who sinks beneath the floor of Joanna Scotcher’s abattoir-adjacent, thrust set but not before expressing a near-total delight in the nihilism that goes with destruction. And if that doesn’t have a contemporary resonance, I don’t know what does. A lesser-known component of the tragic repertoire turns out – who’d have guessed it? – to be a play for today.

Titus Andronicus is at the Hampstead Theatre to 11 October. Book Titus Andronicus tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Titus Andronicus (Photos by Genevieve Girling)