‘Brutality of the highest order’ is promised of Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus, and it does not disappoint. From the opening speeches the action is relentlessly disturbing and challenges all preconceptions of Shakespearean theatre.

This 2006 revival remains bold and energetic, dragging its audience along ruthlessly through the scenes of rape, murder and mutilation. And that’s just the first half. Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy appears to begin with an ending: the celebrated general Titus Andronicus returns victorious after a decade of war, with his prisoners in tow, and only four of twenty-five sons remaining.

To avenge their deaths he kills the first-born son of his prisoner Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and thus sets in motion the cycle of murder and revenge that leaves no character unbloodied.

Titus, played by William Houston, is a grizzled war hero grieving for his dead children and wearied by the decade of fighting for the glory and honour of Rome. He is triumphant in his first entrance – carried in by procession with confetti falling and incense burning – but this initial embodiment of power is not sustained as Houston quickly shows Titus to be an exhausted man, unwilling to shoulder the power and responsibility that the Roman rabble demand from him.

Houston’s performance is certainly memorable, partly on account of the unusual delivery of his lines. At best, his cracked and rasping voice strikes notes of pain and suffering; at worst, it comes across a bit like Bane’s in The Dark Knight Rises, albeit considerably more audible. Houston’s performance comes together from the third act onwards however; what before amounted to an oddity becomes a masterstroke.

Houston is exceptional as Titus plummets deeper into despair and apparent insanity. His performance is increasingly unnerving as he doggedly seeks his revenge, playing a gruesome game of deception with Tamora. The climax comes in the final scene; Titus enters as a fantastically deranged chef, and serves Tamora a specially-baked pie, watching gleefully as she unwittingly cannibalises her two sons.

Prepare yourself for a spectacular understatement: this production is not for the faint-hearted. Those familiar with the play will expect a certain amount of gore, but perhaps not with such unsettling relish. There are some unexpected and wickedly funny moments – a character muses, stroking his chin with a severed hand, at one point – but these darkly humorous instances only make the bloody action more grotesque.

Indeed, the blood is shed so copiously at points that some patrons standing close to the stage (the ‘groundlings’ in the pit) are splattered with it. Some are visibly delighted to be so immersed in the action, others, less so. During the matinee I watched, the body count off-stage surpassed the body count on-stage, most fainting when Lavinia (Flora Spencer-Longhurst) makes her mutilated entrance at the end of Act II.

She has been violently raped, her tongue cut out and both hands removed to prevent her from naming the culprits who have committed such brutality. She trembles and jerks continuously in her agony and shame: it is uncomfortably both agonising and captivating to watch.

That feeling recurs throughout this production; the audience suffers with the play’s victims as well as shares in the power and pleasure of inflicting pain. Obi Abili as Aaron the Moor brings an infectious relish to his character’s murderous mischief.

Abili gives a performance that is both horrifying and hilarious. He swaggers bare-footed across the stage, he seduces the audience with his sly smile and charisma, and brutally murders in a nonchalant fashion; he steals the show.

Titus Andronicus is outstanding perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, its graphic slaughter. Its urgency of action and unshrinking delight in violence and revenge makes this production an unforgettable, if disconcerting, experience. 

★★☆☆☆

Two Stars

“The book always trumps the movie”—a preferred axiom of unmarried American educators stroking their recently adopted third cat, and, unfortunately for fans, illustrative of the recent film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 2005 novel, A Long Way Down. 

The premise: four unlikely strangers form a surrogate family after aborting plans to fling themselves from the top of a popular suicide destination in the heart of London on New Year’s Eve. The foursome includes Martin (Pierce Brosnan), former daytime talk show host, philanderer and notorious ‘pedophile’ (he thought she was eighteen); Maureen (Toni Collette), a middle-aged mother of a young man living in a vegetative state; JJ (Aaron Paul), a mid-twenties American pizza boy; and an eccentric, wildly opinionated and foulmouthed teenage girl (Imogen Poots). The narrative progresses episodically, chronicling their close encounter with death, their inevitable rise to tabloid prominence due to Martin’s celebrity and their burgeoning affection for one another. The film’s primary dramatic tension relies on whether or not such a precarious family dynamic will effectively prevent them from trying to jump again.  

Reviews underscoring discrepancies between page and screen adaptions are often cursory and dry. As I’ve been called both—once in a college admissions letter and once from a gloved customs agent named Phyllis, respectively—I’m inclined to avoid such comparisons. That said, any credible assessment of a cinematically adapted Nick Hornby novel would be remiss in neglecting juxtaposition based principally on one lousy experience in a soundproofed TSA holding cell.

Temporally, Hornby’s novel privileges the reader early on with insight into what ultimately happens to his characters. The outcomes of Martin, Maureen, JJ and Jess are made clear from the onset, thus providing a forum for character exploration and the satire of tabloid media, rather than fussing around with superficial suspense. Unfortunately, director Pascal Chaumeil’s and screenwriter Jack Throne’s film suffers from everything Hornby so adroitly avoided—sentimentality. 

The film transmutes personal mysteries into mere periodic reveals in a series of desperate attempts to sustain the driving narrative force, which consequentially, is one of apprehension. Scenes of private on-screen reflection appear inaccessible without a full appreciation for the context in which these powerful emotions derive from. The film exposes the particular limitations of the cinema, but only when confronted head on with the adaptive preferences of its creators.

Hornby’s novel is a remarkably empathetic portrait of fully realized characters with believable arcs—a high concept premise sustained by selective restraint. The film might entertain those not familiar with Hornby’s work; but to those harboring a special place for the source material, it will play dismally, limping onwards and suffering mostly from the surgical removal of religion, an artificially injected romance, diminished complexity and the worst of all sins: closure.

If that still sounds sexy to you then by all means, get yourself a ticket. If not, buy the book.

★★★★★

5 Stars

In 2002, Richard Linklater decided on the final shot of a film that would take 12 years to shoot and would follow the apparently typical life of a boy, Mason, growing up in modern America. Casting 6-year-old Ellar Coltrane in the central role, Linklater began shooting what would eventually become Boyhood.

No stranger to projects made over extended periods of time, Linklater’s Before trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight) were released at 9-year intervals following the same two characters as they grew into middle age. Boyhood displays the same temporal nous as the other films: beginning with Coldplay, and ending with Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs via the likes of Soulja Boy and High School Musical, Linklater subtly uses music to indicate how far through the film is of the 2002-2013 period covered. Other milestones that the audience passes along with Mason are the midnight releases of each Harry Potter, Gameboys, the invasion of Iraq. For a viewer of university age, Mason’s adolescence will be perfectly in alignment with their own, giving the film a nostalgia factor unlike anything else. One gets the impression that this is a film that will be watched in the future as a record of what 00s America was like.

By turns, the film is funny and sad, tense and playful. To maintain the tone over 12 years of shooting is a gargantuan task in itself, and one to which Linklater proves more than equal. With subject matter ranging from kissing girls, to smoking weed, to leaving home for college, the film would become contrived or clichéd in the hands of lesser directors, but instead Linklater presents a series of highly evocative developmental moments – when Mason’s voice breaks one feels like a grandparent who has blinked and found their grandchildren grown up. The interplay between film and reality also offers some pleasingly prescient moments, like when Mason and his dad wonder aloud if another Star Wars film will ever be made, and when his dad warns him that no good will come of the Iraq invasion. As for Mason himself, it’s hard to find enough superlatives to describe Coltrane’s performance. He constantly surprises, turning from a nervy young boy into a self-assured man. At fourteen or so, he suddenly appears not to be able to deliver any lines, and one worries before realising it’s just Coltrane playing a perfectly-observed teenager. The risk the director took in casting him at six pays off many times over; whatever Coltrane goes on to do next, he’s one to watch.

Despite the film’s title, though, Boyhood isn’t just about Mason. His sister Samantha, played with breathtaking consistency over the 12-year period by Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter, is an almost-parallel study of girlhood. Hilariously precocious, we see her at eight, singing Britney Spears into a hairbrush, at fourteen, with dyed hair and a fierce pout, at twenty, with her new college boyfriend. Changing by turns, yet spookily recognisable from the opening years of the film, her chemistry with Coltrane is as palpable as one would expect from two actors who have grown up together on-screen.

The separated parents of the family, played by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, present their own duality, in that their reactions to events around them seem familiar to the audience, yet these situations are filtered through the eyes of their children in a way that manages to evoke one’s own childhood so accurately that at times it’s almost uncomfortable. The two are phenomenal, beginning as worn-out, uncertain young parents, and ending as worn-out, unflappable veteran parents. Like his son, Hawke’s Mason Sr. gradually matures too. The boy who first worked with Linklater on Before Sunrise is gone, replaced by an actor of immense, understated talent. Not to be outdone, Arquette has matured on-screen and off. Her own experience of marriage, childbirth and divorce during the filming of Boyhood lends her character a dignified maternity despite the fact that, as Mason observes, his mother is just as confused as he is.

Boyhood is a study of the human condition reminiscent of Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life but rather than drawing that film’s parallels between childhood, creation and religion, Linklater keeps the subject matter decidedly mundane. As a result, the film loses beauty but gains poignancy, and mundanity becomes universally relevant. One of the most striking things about Boyhood is how similar being young is for everyone, and how alike experiences of growing up are. It’s impossible not to be acutely aware that the story is happening every day, everywhere. As one of the best films about childhood, perhaps ever, what Boyhood represents in filmmaking terms is a landmark, a project in which art is no longer hostage to practicality and thus can find full expression. It is not to be missed.

“Without contraries is no progression,” asserts William Blake in his infamous book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This hypothesis is put to the test by Jack Shepherd’s play In Lambeth, currently being performed at the Southwark Playhouse, which explores a situation not short of dramatic potential: a fleeting encounter between pragmatic revolutionary Thomas Paine and mystic poet William Blake. Over the course of a moonlit evening somewhere near the end of the 18^th century, “pamphleteer and prophet” heatedly debate their opposing paths towards humanity’s moral enlightenment. The argument, mediated sympathetically by Blake’s loving wife, proves intriguing, but ultimately unsatisfying; for whether the clash of these two contrary natures achieves any progression remains dubious.

Polite warnings of nudity on the theatre door are quickly realised as the play opens on a naked Mr and Mrs Blake, perched in an ethereally lit tree, casually conversing with angels. Immediately Blake’s (Tom Mothersdale) childish insecurity becomes clear; overlooked by an anti-Republican mob, he tetchily insists he poses a threat “spiritually“, if not physically so, and gripes, “I have subversive ideas.” “You’re a poet,” reminds his wife, “Poets don’t count.”

Enter Thomas Paine (Christopher Hunter), whose well-known revolutionary politics have made him count enough to need sanctuary from a pursuing gang out for his blood. The self-assured and smooth-talking Paine seems to rile Blake with everything from his smart coat and fondness for brandy to his dogmatically rational mindset. As night and alcohol wear on, the debate of ‘truth’ versus ‘action’ causes personal jealousy as well as ideological difference to vie with an underlying respect for the other’s ardour and essentially democratic spirit. In a rare moment of fury Paine accuses Blake, “Contemplation. Mysticism. Can’t you see? It’s drawing you away from the world ever deeper into yourself.” Blake pauses, and provokingly replies, “How beautiful it is tonight.”

Both Mothersdale and Hunter have moments of excellence: Mothersdale is particularly gripping when overcome by erratic hysteria, such as when sputtering and giggling out the names ‘Madame La-dee-dah’ and ‘Monsieur Footle-pot’. His introspective monologues are elegantly phrased, and outweigh in profundity recitations of Blake’s actual poetry, which are clichéd in choice and occasionally seem forced. Hunter’s best moments come when light irony masks great moral strength. Telling the story of his desperate flight from a French mob, and relating his inability to explain he was on their side, Paine calmly concludes, whilst buttoning his jacket, that “There’s a moral there somewhere: always learn the language of the country that you’re living in… and never run away.”

Melody Grove provides the show’s best performance as Mrs Blake, whose pained love for her husband and spirited playfulness is convincing and poignant. Although excluded from the grander walks of life by her gender and illiteracy, her character is saved from narcissism and her acting from prioritizing thematic progression. Grove’s vivacious storytelling is consistently compelling, and her bold confrontation with the mob while Paine and Blake bicker upstages the revolutionaries. Returning with a spark in her eye, she declares, “They don’t scare me… roughs like that – they’re all piss and wind!”

Overall, however, the audience is left unsure as to what In Lambeth is trying to prove. Is this a tragedy, in which two men’s outwardly different approaches prevent them from working together towards a shared goal? Or is Shepherd optimistically reminding us it takes all sorts to make a world? Despite this confusion, In Lambeth is an informative, engaging, and imaginative work. Indeed, perhaps Shepherd intended to leave us puzzling over Blake’s ambiguous and ironically delivered proverb, “opposition is true friendship.”