What do you do, in this sensitive age, with a play so extreme that the trigger warnings include racism, cannibalism, rape and self-harm? Even since Lucy Bailey’s celebrated Globe gore-fest in 2006, the impact of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy has changed. The answer, in Jude Christian’s brilliantly provocative close-up production, is to cast it with women and play it in travesty, with comic set pieces and songs pointing out, as the opening number has it, that this is “torture porn, but more artistic”.
Not a drop of stage blood is shed, but the illusion of horror grips as candles are snuffed out in lieu of lives in an increasingly farcical frenzy which begins with tapers being dashed to the floor and ends up with lumps of wax being ground up and fed into a liquidiser, before being served to the vengeful Gothic queen Tamora (Kirsten Foster) in the play’s infamous pie scene.
