Titus, decidedly on the boil

As director Julie Taymor had turned a cartoon, The Lion King, into a huge international stage hit, I suppose her next stop would have to be Shakespeare's earliest and most gory play, the tragedy of the Roman general Titus Andronicus.

The play was a successful potboiler of its day and Julie saw the scenes of violence as "penny-arcade nightmares". Anthony Hopkins plays the mad Titus, war-hero-turned-lunatic, a man who has been at war for 40 years and lost 21 sons in battles for Rome. I play the petulant, dangerous and corrupt heir to the throne, Saturninus, one of the lovers of the seductive and manipulative queen of the Goths, Tamora, played by Jessica Lange. Her other lover, the illicit one, is Aaron, the Moor played by Harry Lennix from ER. She has his child but I get to marry her. This so enrages and disorients Titus that he kills one of his own sons. Although a truce is feigned by Tamora, the battle between Titus and her begins. Other actors in the battle include Laura Fraser as Titus's daughter, Matthew Rhys as Demetrius and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Chiron. Tamora's sons are Angus MacFadyen, Colm Feore and James Frain.

Shakespeare is the ultimate test of emotion and this story is one of war, ritual, vengeance, rape, infanticide - anything terrible you can think of. There's a lot of imagery written into the screenplays and the film conceptualises what you've read by setting the story in a Rome time-bent three ways: as an ancient wilderness of tigers, as the Fascist Rome of Mussolini and Rome as it is today. I've done untraditional Shakespeare before, like a cross-dressing Hamlet at the Donmar, but it was nothing like this.