One of Shakespeare’s blood­i­est plays presen­ted in a hair salon around Hal­loween? Excel­lent idea.

Fresh Dada presen­ted their take on Tit­us Andronicus last week. . Tit­us (Julia Har­ris in the tra­di­tion­ally male lead role) has returned tri­umphantly from the war with pris­on­ers. One of them, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, (Kar­en Anslow) pleads for the life of her daugh­ter (tra­di­tion­ally a son) but is ignored and her daugh­ter is slain. Hop­ing-to-be-Emper­or, Sat­urninus (Neal Barber), ori­gin­ally want­ing to marry Tit­us’ only daugh­ter Lavin­ia (Catri­ona Tipene) but rejec­ted by her, takes Tamora as his wife instead. Grief stricken, Tamora prom­ises to avenge the slight against her new hus­band and at the same time revenge the death of her daugh­ter. Vicious plot­ting and viol­ence ensue. This whole play is a con­tent warn­ing. Spoil­er: it doesn’t end well for any­one.

Anchored by strong per­form­ances from Julia Har­ris (Tit­us Andronicus), Alan Cara­bott (Mar­cus Andronicus), and Kar­en Anslow (Tamora) the story zips along at a good pace. The jux­ta­pos­i­tion of beau­ti­ful chan­deliers and the bloody story was strik­ing. A min­im­al­ist set is com­ple­men­ted by eleg­ant cos­tum­ing (design­er Sylvia Gil­bert-Potts) – suits for the men, pen­cil skirts for (some of) the women. Dir­ect­or Joshua Hop­ton-Stew­art obvi­ously has clear ideas about each of the fac­tions. This is par­tic­u­larly strong with Tamora’s two sons (James Cos­tello Lada­nyi and Josh McDon­ald) in the creepy scene before they rape and dis­fig­ure Lavin­ia (Catri­ona Tipene). It didn’t feel quite as coher­ent in his vis­ion for the Goth army who were now fol­low­ing Tit­us’ son Lucius (Gary Miller). Com­plic­ated story? Very much so, but eas­ily under­stood thanks to the cos­tum­ing and afore­men­tioned dir­ect­ori­al vis­ion.

Look­ing for­ward to what Fresh Dada presents next.