Charles Lamb was happy to accept the view, first put about by adapters, that Titus Andronicus was not written by Shakespeare. Its ghastly brutality; its violence based on the assumption – unstated, unchallenged – that the only law is might and absolute dictatorial right; its unconstrained, bloody and savage theme of revenge; how, ask the doubters, could it be the work of Shakespeare, that poet of psychology? But it is. Aaron is Iago and Moor in one; Titus is a presager of Lear; Lavinia is a little reminiscent of Ophelia; the language is full of characteristic felicities – "patient yourself, Madame"; "Dissemble your griefs and discontents"; "The blot and enemy to our general name"; "Dawning day new comfort hath inspired"; and so on for much besides – it is the master's hand. It is an early play, dating from about 1592, and some of the histories which followed were not without their murder and rapine, so it is not without comparisons elsewhere in the works. None of them, however, equals it in gallonage of blood. 
      In the great works of a decade and more later, Shakespeare brought his focus down to a refined sense of what is meant by a single murder, in which the distillation of poison or the stroke of a knife splits the moral cosmos into materials for universally significant comment. The final scene might see slaughter, by way of resolution and the tidying of loose ends; Hamlet ends like that. But in Titus there are ten dead, nine of them murdered in the course of the action, one of them horribly so: raped, her tongue cut out, her hands lopped off, and then out of pity killed by her own father to end her dishonour – this being the wretched Lavinia. In this fast, furious, keenly directed and brilliantly performed spectacle of gory hatreds a mere eight actors serve as the whole of Rome. But that is no surprise, for they are members of the Kaos Company, and they act with such relish and energy that they become multitudes. Lea Begley's Titus is a monumental creature, both in his bone-weary triumph at the outset, and in his half-maddened griefs at the end. Lisa Tramontin's Tamora is marvellously bitchy and sexy, dangerous to all around her and at last to herself. Her lover and co-conspirator Aaron is played with consummate skill by Guy Burgess, a name to conjure with as regards this role. The whole cast were inspirational, abetted by a clever staging of sliding mortuary doors and a chilling tiled floor which well-displayed the red life shed on it with such ghastly frequency. 
      There is much satisfaction in the revenge Titus finally wreaks on Tamora and her rapist-murderer sons, as there is in his own son's dispatching of the ten-thousand-times wicked Aaron. To get to these resolutions the play wades through gouting, spurting, staining rivers of blood – almost nothing in contemporary film, still less theatre, comes anywhere near it for horror upon horror of pitiless violence. One comes to realise that perhaps this was indeed how Rome behaved, in the later Empire, when it had long lost its way and was declining into the unconstrained savagery of absolutism. It is well not to have lived then, or at any time or in any place like it. That is just one reason why Titus remains eternally relevant, as a warning. Another is that it clearly describes the cost of vengeance as a personal and political policy.
AC Grayling