Once the black-sheep of the Shakespearean family, Titus Andronicus has acquired a new respectability: it is seen more as prototype Lear than Elizabethan Pulp Fiction. But while Bill Alexander's new production has a fine, sombre, subfusc dignity, there were times when I guiltily hungered for a little more playful malevolence.
Like Deborah Warner in her famous 1987 revival, Alexander realises this is less a play about violence and cruelty than about grief: in particular, about Senecan stoicism in the face of suffering. In the great central section of the play we watch with appalled astonishment as the raped Lavinia enters with her hands cut off and her tongue excised. Her father, Titus, is then conned into chopping off his own hand in exchange for the lives of his two sons, only for a messenger to enter bearing their severed heads. This is as much as the human frame can endure.
Alexander handles this core concerto of grief with great sensitivity. Eve Myles's Lavinia becomes a whimpering, shuddering, infinitely touching emblem of despair. Ian Gelder as her uncle Marcus, having delivered a speech filled with classicalallusions, confronts the futility of language, crying "O, could our mourning ease thy misery." And David Bradley's Titus, after witnessing the destruction of his daughter and sons, breaks into a strange, wild laughter that lies beyond tears.
All this is bravely done. But, in the early stages, Alexander could do more to define the fractious decline of the Roman republic: the victorious locals and the captive Goths sport the same drab costumes, and Ruari Murchison's set, a rugged, wooden peninsula backed by a stair-rod curtain of light, lacks historical specificity. And, later, Shakespeare's self-conscious theatricality is insufficiently stressed: the scene where Tamora comes to Titus disguised as Revenge misses its masked extravagance since she simply looks like the cowled Scottish widow in the property ad.
But Bradley plays Titus's scenes of feigned madness with an excellent low-key irony. Joe Dixon also lends the Moor, Aron, an exuberant, unapologetic Marlovian villainy. And both John Lloyd Fillingham's Saturninus, all nervous tics and pouts, and Maureen Beattie's ferocious Tamora vindicate the descriptpion of Rome as "a wilderness of tigers. It all adds up to a dark, dignified production in which crude sensationalism and mocking laughter are kept at bay. Less voluptuous than Peter Brook's Stratford production, Alexander's version makes a strong case for Titus as the raw essence of tragedy.
· Until November 7. Box office: 0870 609 1110.
