"Titus Andronicus". Jesus College Shakespeare Project

Titus Andronicus is a famously violent play, and the warning notice outside the auditorium in Jesus College reads: ‘PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THE PLAY CONTAINS BRUTAL DEPICTION OF R*PE AND MUTILATION AND ITS AFTERMATH, FREQUENT RACIST SLURS, SCENES OF MURDER, ASSAULT, SEXUAL COERCION, DISTRESSING DEPICTIONS OF CORPORAL AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, HUMAN SACRIFICE, GRIEF, DEATHS (INCLUDING THOSE OF CHILDREN AND ATTEMPTED INFANTICIDE), MENTAL ILLNESS, CANNIBALISM, VOMITING, WEAPONS AND SUDDEN LOUD NOISES.’

You’d think that would be enough, but they forgot to mention cruelty to animals, with one of the most famous scenes in the play revolving around the death by stabbing of a fly.

Some productions literally wallow in blood. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s most recent outing went so far as employing a magic consultant so that they could convincingly depict Titus having his own hand cut off in full view of the audience. It makes for great spectacle, but one of the challenges facing any production of Titus nowadays is where to draw the line between torture porn and tortured poetry. The play has suffered over the centuries from being seen almost as an immature joke because of its excessive violence. The Victorians tried to pretend it wasn’t by Shakespeare and relegated it to his juvenilia. Even as recently as the 1980s, when the BBC undertook their interminable trawl through the Complete Works, Titus was introduced by psychologist Anthony Clare, who described it as the Elizabethan equivalent of a ‘video nasty’.

It's only over the last twenty years or so that Titus Andronicus has come to be seen as not just on a par with Shakespeare’s other works, but even among his best. The utter bleakness of its vision has a profound absurdity (the scene in which Titus begs an empty road to pardon his sons’ lives anticipating Waiting for Godot by a mere 350 years), and its dialogue is so clear and uncompromising that it shocks you to attention, like the blowing of a bugle.

Peter Sutton’s production, part of his ongoing Jesus College Shakespeare Project, conveys all the horror of Shakespeare’s original, and yet it never once descends into gratuitous violence. It is simultaneously graphic and restrained, shocking and thought-provoking, awful and beautiful.

The Jesus College Project invites comparison with the BBC’s mammoth undertaking from forty years ago. They are both years-long missions to take on the Complete Works. But the BBC, as our National Broadcaster, quailed at the enormous weight of that responsibility. They retreated into a succession of predictable, plodding renditions, and most of their productions were as creaky as a sinking ship. The JCSP feels no such burden. Sutton is free – as he should be – to approach each play afresh, as experimentally or as traditionally as he feels suitable.

With Titus, there are some bold ideas, and they pay off in spades. Along with the play itself, there is a chorus-like narrator. Between each scene they sing a section of the Ballad of Titus Andronicus, a poem published around the same time as Shakespeare’s play was first performed. These chorus sections outline the action we are about to see unfold, giving the play a once-removed, performative quality. Likewise, the cast are uniformly attired in white tops and black trousers, as if they are merely ciphers, enacting some sort of ancient rite. When acting they are in full character mode, bringing out the gut-wrenching emotion of every scene. When not required, they never leave the stage area, but sit on the floor facing away from the action with blank stares, reinforcing a sense of artificiality that pervades the whole event.

All these decisions build a palpable atmosphere of alienation in the room: a sense that what we are watching is not real or even trying to be real, but instead has the significance of a fable about it. And that restrained distancing also allows the graphic power of the text full rein to work its magic. The violence in this production is certainly represented on the stage, but it’s really hammered home by the words, and these are delivered with astonishing clarity and emotional depth. When Tamora, played with stone-hearted fervour by Leah Aspden, gives her sons carte blanche to rape and dismember the innocent Lavinia, her added instruction, ‘But when ye have the honey ye desire, Let not this wasp outlive, us both to sting’, drips with cruelty. And Shakespeare’s uncompromising bluntness is also on full display, with Titus announcing to the doomed Chiron and Demetrius (whose throats he is about to cut) ‘Lavinia 'tween her stumps doth hold The basin that receives your guilty blood.’ No sobriquets here. Those arms are just stumps, and Roman Pitman, as Titus, embodies the obduracy of the inflexible father. The entire cast is outstanding, and particular mentions must also go to Tom Pavey as a short-fused Saturninus, Alex Still as a Marcus with the only shred of humanity in his world, and Kate Harkness, whose agony as Lavinia speaks volumes with no words.

The history of Shakespearean theatre is full of people fainting during performances of Titus Andronicus, and this production is no exception. After the most horrific scene in the play (and possibly most horrific scene in any play) one audience member had to be taken out and given medical care. There was a twenty-minute break before the actors resumed. If anything, the intensity of the performance ratcheted up several notches after that point. It was as if the cast realized they had something powerful and dangerous in their hands, like a loaded gun. It wasn’t a dead play anymore. It was alive, and more powerful than anyone suspected. Those scenes of violence were shocking not just because of the acts committed, but because of the inescapable truth they told us of man’s inhumanity to man.

This production triumphs not just at bringing home the beauty and terror of Titus, but also in underlining its contemporary relevance. The barely-believable brutality meted out by one sectarian group on another, the mercilessness of revenge attacks, the use of rape as a weapon of war… we have not moved on very far from the days of early Rome. This Titus Andronicus, with its honesty, openness and intensity, may not offer any hope for the future, but it draws the curtain to show the heart of darkness most governments and people seek to ignore.