Masks of the Orient

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. It craves the kind of superbly imaginative interpretation it’s given by Ninagawa. This is what the play always needs. Not a misguided attempt to present it ‘realistically’, but an extreme stylisation, as here in a language derived from the great Japanese theatre styles of Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki.

The white-box set brings the action forwards into the auditorium; at centre-stage a replica of the famous sculpture of Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf never lets you forget the notional Roman context. It’s exactly the right space for Ninagawa’s superb choreography of movement, which can spill out into the whole theatre or focus on the terrible figure of the maimed Lavinia finding her way through a maze of sterile white blooms. ‘Chrysanthemums and butchery’ was a famous German critic’s summation of classical Japanese theatre.

It’s with good reason that Ninagawa complains that Western actors ‘don’t have stylisation’.