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Decapitated heads are carried on stage in Morrisons bags, and Lavinia is raped in the back of a white van in this modern, urban staging of Shakespeare’s goriest tragedy. As for the pie via which Titus tricks Tamora into yomming up her sons – it looks horribly like a meat feast pizza.
The first piece of theatre to be produced in Peckham’s multi-storey car park, this ‘Titus Andronicus’ captures some of the play’s hysterically grotesque humour. But with a mixed-skill cast, a community choir, parkour and beatboxing elements, and all the challenges of site-specific performance, new London company The Theory of Everything bites off more than it can chew.
Director Pia Furtado’s concept makes poetic sense, initially. What better contemporary substitute for Shakespeare’s ‘ruthless, vast and gloomy woods’ than a disused car park after dusk? And who better to soundtrack the tragedy of Lavinia, mutilated into silence by her rapists, than beatboxer Bellatrix, who wins world championship titles with her tongue?
Returning from Rome’s wars, Titus (RSC alumnus Adam Burton) screeches up in a battered car with plastic-bound bodies in the boot, while heirs to the imperial throne Saturninus and Bassianus bounce in trainers around trailing mic cables as they battle for the title of Emperor. The London skyline is a stunning territorial backdrop.
But the setting causes problems for an already imperfect play. Trains thunder like giant erasers through chunks of script, and tension dissipates across the huge space. At one point we’re distracted from a murder when Saturninus negotiates a tricky five-point turn.
While you expect raw, urban menace you get something cheesier and strangely reminiscent of Nineties dystopian movies, with safe snatches of parkour and a soundtrack that quickly resorts to pre-record. Despite an exhilarating opening sequence, the star of the show is, sadly, the view.