ONE of the villains in Titus Andronicus at the RSC last week came out wielding a chainsaw at one point. The image was startling, part grotesque Grand Guignol, part terrifying excess. The barely suppressed audience titter suggested that it reminded others, as well as me, of Elon Musk.
Titus was Shakespeare’s attempt to crown the tradition of the revenge play, which packed theatres throughout the 16th century. A decade ago, watching it felt like peering into the dark psyche of a bygone era when society was governed by rigid codes of honour. It was a historical curio, not a present reality.
How swiftly things change! Today, it looks like watching the primal politics of Trumpworld: a place where civic norms have collapsed, leaders act from wounded pride, and revenge has become the primary currency of politics. Titus begins as a war hero and ends as a madman staging a death-feast, feeding his enemies their own children.
Revenge isn’t just private retribution. It is public and performative, just as in the world of Donald Trump, where taunting nicknames and retribution-themed rallies have given way to persecution and prosecutions. This week, he threatened to arrest the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, after he objected to President Trump’s decision to send the National Guard on to the streets of Los Angeles.
Revenge is not just about punishment. It is about humiliation, dominance, and spectacle — as witnessed by the degrading theatre of Trump press conferences with Volodymir Zelensky and others. President Trump doesn’t just seek to win: he wants his enemies to be seen losing.
In the world of both Titus and Trump, trust in institutions is dissolving. Power comes from populist acclamation. Courtrooms are theatrical stages on which decisions are legitimate only if the right side wins, as are elections. Mr Trump openly promises vengeance on his enemies: judges, journalists, political rivals, even fellow Republicans.
In both worlds, women are instrumentalised as little more than symbols of power and abuse. Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, is horribly mutilated, but her pain is seen chiefly as a symbol of Titus’s shame, of Rome’s corruption, of male violence. In Trumpworld, women are avatars of purity, or targets of misogynistic rhetoric: “nasty women”. Female power is something to be mocked or crushed; female pain is suspect.
In Titus and Trumpworld, everyone claims victimhood. Everyone has a grievance, which becomes moral licence for retribution. Shakespeare’s Aaron the Moor is as intelligent, ruthless, and as gleefully malevolent as several characters in the Trump inner circle, who seem to delight in provocation and spite. This is politics as the theatre of cruelty.
The director, Max Webster, gave extraordinary expression to all this in the Swan Theatre in Stratford. There was so much blood gushing that the front rows of the audience had to be protected by a glass screen. But the violence was distanced and expressionistic. Those who had been killed got up and left the stage with post-mortem writhing, which conveyed inner agonies rather than objective reality. Both the wolverine physical theatre and the stately symbolism were vividly theatrical.
But, looking at the bloodstained stage at the end of the performance, it felt as though we were no longer looking into the past. We were looking into a mirror.