Titus Andronicus: Simon Russell Beale is superb in this beautiful, blood-soaked nightmare

Telegraph

30-04-2025

Any time Simon Russell Beale tackles Shakespeare – his forte – it qualifies as a major event. But marvelling at his superlative Titus Andronicus, which brings him back to his alma mater, the RSC, I also can't help observing how his choice of roles itself has a zeitgeisty feel for major events. He played Timon of Athens amid the financial crisis, King Lear in the run-up to the EU referendum, and Prospero in The Tempest when it felt as if his valorised type of actor was entering a valedictory phase.
With Titus, the Bard's most visceral play, Max Webster's revival lands in the Swan at a time when violence, reported and graphically relayed, is part of our quotidian reality. Of course, brutality is a human constant, but it's pressing in on us now from all sides. Furthermore, in the spectacle of a loyal Roman general suffering the dismemberment of his comfort and hope, as a result of tyrannical authority, the work speaks, as if with urgency, to the current mood of rupture between citizen and state.
At 64, Beale is now a generation older than Brian Cox was when he gave a career-best, Olivier-winning account of the role for the RSC in 1988. While there's an attendant drop in martial machismo (not that this was ever Beale's calling-card), his elder-statesman air lends him a frail dignity that will be remorselessly shredded.
Entering stooped in a grey overcoat, his Titus is the model of fixity, as if weighed by the cost of his campaigns (drenched in his sons' blood). His eyes widen in discreet disbelief when Joshua James's capricious emperor Saturninus seizes on his daughter Lavinia for himself and there's plain distress when this sick monster orders the release and elevation of those he has captured: chief among them Tamora, queen of the Goths (Wendy Kweh). The performance thereafter beautifully charts Titus' journey from self-containment to man wildly undone, to the point of madness – emerging as the masterchef of one's nightmares, in that notorious grisly banquet where he serves Tamora her pie-baked sons.
The blood-letting can risk becoming a distracting circus in its own right. Webster – who orchestrates animalistic scampering movement, stylised horror and ritualised action – doesn't stint on sensation. With machinery deployed on automated overhead tracks, as if at an abattoir, here be men strung from hooks, a hand severed by a chainsaw, gore jetting all over the place and Letty Thomas's ravished Lavinia left tongue-less and hand-bereft. Oddly, it's the spurts of poetry, as if in redemptive answer to the inhumanity, that stay with you.
As much as he catches the dark incidental comedy of Titus's numb stoicism, it's Beale's handling of the lyricism that brings a perverse smile of pleasure to the lips. And the verse-speaking is largely tremendous across the board, with Emma Fielding akin to an appalled witness as his sister Marcia (a neat gender-flip) and Natey Jones ferocious yet oddly forgivable – because so damned for the colour of his skin – as Aaron. Much to chew on, and heaps to applaud, but not for the easily queasy.
Until June 7; rsc.org.uk