The Royal Shakespeare Company is preparing to stage one of its most violent productions yet – and it’s no exaggeration. Director Max Webster’s new take on Titus Andronicus, often described as Shakespeare’s bloodiest work, involves a stage outfitted with a drainage system, abattoir hooks, and what he casually calls “gallons of blood.” It’s not metaphor. The crew is literally mopping between scenes.
Webster has had to choreograph 27 acts of on-stage violence – from amputations to tongue removals – as he brings this early Shakespearean revenge tragedy back to life in all its disturbing detail. The production, starring acclaimed actor Simon Russell Beale, opens at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon with one clear mission: not to hold back.
“We’ve built a kind of wet room on stage,” Webster says during a video call from rehearsals. “It’s not just about showing violence – it’s about the audience feeling the weight of it.”
Titus Andronicus isn’t a play that people watch passively. In 2014, over 100 audience members fainted during Lucy Bailey’s production at Shakespeare’s Globe – including this reporter, who briefly blacked out and woke up in a stranger’s lap. It was grim, it was intense, and it proved the play’s ability to provoke strong, even physical, reactions.
First performed in the early 1590s, Titus tells the story of a Roman general whose act of vengeance against a captured enemy queen sparks a chain of horrific reprisals. Fourteen characters die in increasingly grotesque ways – including a scene in which two men are baked into a pie and served to their mother. It’s Shakespeare at his most extreme.
For a long time, the play was dismissed as a lesser work – too gory, too sensational. The Victorians found it tasteless. Even today, it’s staged far less often than Shakespeare’s more revered tragedies. But in recent decades, directors and actors have found new ways to mine its dark power. Notable productions have starred Laurence Olivier, Patrick Stewart, and Anthony Hopkins, who played Titus in Julie Taymor’s surreal and violent 1999 film adaptation.
Brian Cox, who led a harrowing 1987 production by Deborah Warner, once described the play as the most interesting he’d ever done. He also pointed to the twisted humour that occasionally seeps through the horror, calling it “a young man’s play, full of energy and ludicrous laughter.”
Webster isn’t going for laughs. This Titus will be brutal and dead serious. “We’re playing it straight,” he says. “Some directors lean into the dark comedy or go full Tarantino – we’re not doing that. We’re treating the violence as real and painful.”
Set in a modern, vaguely defined conflict zone, the production avoids explicit comparisons to real-world conflicts but can’t help feeling timely. With ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Webster says the themes of state violence, revenge, and the cycle of brutality are far from abstract.
“I can walk down the Avon and feel calm,” he says. “But around the world, people are living through the kind of horrors this play shows. It’s not fantasy.”
Still, he knows some audiences will laugh – nervously, at least. That’s something the team will monitor during previews, deciding whether those moments are signs of relief or indicators that the violence needs to hit harder.
The big question, of course, is why we keep coming back to this kind of material at all. Why stage a play so gruesome it needs a drain? Why buy tickets to watch people suffer and die on stage?
Simon Russell Beale, who asked Webster to direct Titus, told The Guardian that he doesn’t fully understand it either. “I don’t understand the violence. I don’t understand why we as an audience feel excited, stimulated, challenged by it. It’s so relentless.”
And yet, Titus was popular in Shakespeare’s own time. It followed a wave of revenge tragedies that audiences couldn’t get enough of – plays filled with murder, dismemberment, and poetic justice. They echoed even older forms of drama, such as Seneca’s Roman tragedies or the sacrificial rituals of Ancient Greek theatre.
Webster suggests that perhaps violence on stage offers a kind of catharsis – a way to confront our darker thoughts in a safe space. “Maybe watching this stuff helps us not do it in real life,” he says. “Everyone has weird, dark fantasies they don’t talk about. Seeing them staged can be an escape. Or maybe a relief.”
Recent research backs that up. A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that horror entertainment may allow us to explore human darkness without actual risk. It satisfies our curiosity about what people are capable of – and helps us rehearse how we might deal with fear or trauma.
Webster isn’t worried about a repeat of the Globe fainting spree. “As long as there’s a content warning, people can choose,” he says. “If they faint, they faint.”
But in an era saturated with violent media – from true crime podcasts to war documentaries and blood-soaked streaming shows – the question lingers: is the theatre simply reflecting our reality, or feeding our appetite for it?
Either way, Titus Andronicus remains a challenging, fascinating piece of theatre. And if this production proves anything, it’s that even centuries later, Shakespeare’s darkest play still has the power to shock.
