Shakespeare’s bloody revenge-fest is full of horror and grotesquerie but the camaraderie of performing it with a youth theatre had an upbeat effect

Titus Andronicus has to be among William Shakespeare’s worst plays. In fact TS Eliot called it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written”. Yet it holds a very special place in my heart. It’s a bloody revenge-fest in which each act of violence is more grotesque than the last. Titus Andronicus returns from war with “barbarous” Tamora, “Queen of the Goths”, as his prisoner. She stealthily proceeds to kill and destroy his family, and when he discovers this, he murders her sons and serves them up to her in a pie. The play ends with gudgeons of fake blood and a sea of carnage. In Shakespeare’s day it was a huge hit, a kind of slasher film of the 16th century.

Plays are very powerful things and I have spent my life watching them and writing them. Some have been revelatory but none has affected me like Titus Andronicus. It was the first play, outside of school, that I was ever in – so I suppose this is about the transformative power of youth theatre.

Antony and Cleopatra? Exhausting. Lear? Magnificent but flawed. Hamlet? Limitless. For Shakespeare’s birthday, the Guardian’s former theatre critic ranks all the plays

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