Audience members fainting at scenes of rape, mutilation and murder at Shakespeare's Globe during its current production of Titus Andronicus offer a reassuring reminder of the power of physical aggression in the theatre. Though it's worth remembering that, in hot weather, they faint a lot anyway at that Bankside open air cockpit; I've seen people pass out at Love's Labour's Lost, for heaven's sake. But spilt blood and guts are what the Greek and Jacobean theatre were all about, with offstage violence and neutralising masks in the former and buckets of red stuff splashing all over the groundlings in the latter. And how refreshing it is to see such stomach-churning atrocity in the theatre, where it rightly belongs, rather than on depressing newsreels from around the world. Here are five more on-stage bloodbaths capable of sending the audience rushing for the exit.
Sarah Kane's Blasted
Sarah Kane's Blasted picked up the challenge of bringing the horrors of a war zone into a domestic setting, though most critics were initially squeamish and dismissive of Titus-like scenes of incestuous rape, eye-gouging and baby-burial under the floorboards. The play is now acclaimed as a modern classic, though that doesn't make it any easier to sit through.
Almost anything by Edward Bond
An Edward Bond season at the tiny Cock Tavern in Kilburn High Road in 2010 restored the author of the baby-stoning play, Saved (1965), to critical and public scrutiny. Bond advocated a return to the lucid frenzy and forensic violence of the Greeks in Olly's Prison (a 1993 teleplay), in which a father kills an obstinately silent daughter for refusing to drink a cup of tea; and in There Will Be More, when a modern, child-killing Medea becomes a refugee from the asylum bombed by her own military husband.
American Psycho
American Psycho at the Almeida Theatre last year, with Matt Smith as Brett Easton Ellis's psychotic Wall Street trader, was a nerve-shredding, almost nauseatingly chic musical version of a brilliant, hard-to-read novel. Blood was splattered all right, but with nice lighting and choreography: this was murder with designer labels and hatchets with handbags. No need to cancel dinner.
A View from the Bridge
The Arthur Miller classic is on at the Young Vic, so there's still time to gasp at an unexpected and really rather beautiful climactic bloodbath, a consequence of misguided passion in the lowliest of Brooklyn households.
Peter O'Toole's Macdeath
Peter O'Toole was generally derided for trying to restore Jacobean blood and thunder to his 1980 performance of Macbeth, which had people fainting with laughter rather than horror and revulsion. Variously dubbed "Macdeath", "Macflop" and an irresponsible waste of Kensington Gore, the show at least reminded us of how great an actor O'Toole could be even when awful, and how much we'd lost in Shakespearean production by throwing the baby out with the bloodbath water.
