Patrick Carnegy

Masks of the Orient

issue 01 July 2006

Titus Andronicus is the Shakespeare shocker of the moment. At the Globe in London the groundlings have made Page Three news by fainting away in droves as limbs are lopped and tongues excised in Lucy Bailey’s staging (which I regret I haven’t seen). In the Daily Telegraph Charles Spencer rates it the hottest, goriest ticket in town.

Arriving in Stratford-upon-Avon from Japan, Yukio Ninagawa’s extraordinary company eschews the buckets of stage blood in favour of fountains of exploding red ribbon. Ninagawa’s previous venture with the RSC — an Anglo-Japanese Lear with Nigel Hawthorne uneasily in the title role — fell between the two cultures. With Titus Ninagawa is once again at the top of the brilliant form he struck at Edinburgh in the late 1980s with Macbeth and The Tempest.

Titus is a rough and unlovely diamond on the page.

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