Now here's one to treasure - although treasure might be the wrong word for Shakespeare's goriest tragedy. By half time this splatterfest has notched up torture, rape, mutilations and murder. The violence is so graphic - tongues bitten out and arms chopped off on stage - that it makes Macbeth seem like a picnic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the play is seldom performed. Academics condemn it for want of poetry and theatre directors fear that the relentless bloodbath will cost them a fortune in Kensington Gore and leave audiences giggling rather than gasping.
Phil Wilmott's brave, horribly intimate production proves them wrong. It is like watching the worst of the TV news in close-up. Wilmott's Rome has a modern feel and, while the production is never unsubtle enough to make direct comparisons, the conflicts and terrible atrocities of recent times in the Balkans immediately spring to mind.
There is a thrilling paciness about the production that always pushes the narrative. Wilmott never forgets that first and foremost he is telling a story - one that, unlike most Shakespeare plays, will be unfamiliar to most of the audience. His production is full of tiny observations that flesh out the characters and the terrible trail of revenge: Tamora's sons, a couple of brutal football hooligans, slow-clapping Lavinia's desperate pleas for mercy, the poor mutilated girl attempting to get her dead husband's arms to clasp her, Titus breaking his daughter's neck with such sweet tenderness.
Fiona Hankey provides an atmospheric set central to which is the Andronici family tomb, etched with the word "revenge" and trailed with crumbling masonry and strangulating ivy. The small space is used to maximum effect. Wilmott overdoes the music, but otherwise this is a tremendous, beautifully acted and well-spoken production that has a real eye for the dramatic ironies of this impossible play. Wilmott is a ridiculously underrated director, and if this doesn't give him his big break then there is as little justice in the world of theatre as there is in Rome.
Until Sunday. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
