Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Vincent Skyner, Emily Hargreaves, Natalie Bedkowska, Sarah Williams, Alishia Killian, Amy Robinson, Henrietta Martins, Ayesha Tarbuck, Christopher Braden, Micahael Emmerson, Alice Williams, Carly O’ Hare, Sammi Jo Christie, Jerome Griffin.

At times there just doesn’t feel like enough gore in the world, especially in theatre, something meaty to get the teeth into, something with anger and bite, and if it must be done then it deserves credit. Titus Andronicus is still after 400 years the one play that feeds off all the negativity and feelings of revenge that can be ravaged in humanity; take one life and you are a murderer, take them all and you become a god, as Stalin once wrote, it is just a matter of statistics.

Titus Andronicus is a difficult play to stage at the best of times, even in the world of the seasoned professional it can leave modern audiences cold, frustrated and a little underwhelmed and yet when it is done, when it is told with more than an element of desire, it can hold the simple truth of humanity’s insatiable desire to make war even during peace, to take lives where it sees fit. If performed well, it can hold an audience’s attention as well as Macbeth or Hamlet, if performed with favour it can make a person grasp the enormity of the horror of revenge and how it just ends up as bloodbath.

For the students of the Liverpool City College under the directorship of Paul Carmichael, to take on Titus Andronicus is to understand that youth theatre holds no barriers, that each student is enamoured by the flow of the words and is willing to seize the moment that such a play presents. The language is brutal, it is born of hate and fear and is a perfect production for the times we invariably find ourselves in.

The words of the play are carried well throughout and the production does not shy away from some of the more gruesome aspects of William Shakespeare’s imagination; it is to that the cast must be congratulated, especially the superb Jerome Griffin, Sarah Williams as the mutilated Lavinia and Alice Williams, whose portrayal as the Queen of the Goths was startling and verging on the wonderfully possessed.

A captivating evening of theatre, a tale well told and one that raises the spectre of one of Shakespeare’s hardest plays to perform to great heights. A production at the Liverpool City College not to miss.

Ian D. Hall