A game of vengeance

No director has made more radical, provocative or transformative use of the Globe's stage than Lucy Bailey.

Her intriguing production of Shakespeare's brutal revenge drama, which culminates in that famous dinner-party where the Empress eats a pie containing the flesh of her freshly murdered sons, dispenses with the Elizabethan back-drop.

Instead, Miss Bailey and designer William Dudley convert the stage into a nightmarish black space or " temple of death," its 16th-century features concealed.

Black cloth swathes the stage, covers pillars, turns exits into strange, cavernous tunnels and obliterates the gallery. A black canvas awning or velarium covers the circular space at the theatre's apex. The effect is liberating and exciting.

The Globe, true to Titus Andronicus's dark spirit, becomes a timeless, claustrophobic arena, Shakespeare's "wilderness of tigers", where a game of barbarous revenge is played. Miss Bailey spills out the action from stage to the Pit, with wooden walkways and two-tiered trollies on which victorious warriors strut.

To triumphal drumbeats, a military procession stamps its way through the crowds of groundlings, in whose midst a huge black mesh net is thrown down, representing the pit into which a royal corpse is tossed.

Yet the production and principal actors lack the psychological subtlety and rigour Bailey's inventive staging leads you to expect.

Contemporary warfare, not to mention the murderous knife culture now prevalent in London, means the stabbings, hangings, severing of heads and hands in Titus Andronicus no longer seem melodramatic excesses. Miss Bailey's handling of the Blood and Revenge themes is, however, not that assured.

The horrors do not horrify enough - though Laura Rees's Lavinia strikes pitiful notes - and the melding of gallows humour with atrocious incident comes uneasily across.

When Titus, instigator and victim of revenge, assumes the role of a chef at the cannibalistic banquet, Douglas Hodge shamelessly plays for laughs instead of inducing shudders.