The real Macbeth Thane of Cawdor became King of Scotland after the death of Duncan I but was killed

The real Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor, became King of Scotland after the death of Duncan I but was killed at Lumphanan in what is now Aberdeenshire and buried on the island of Iona.Shakespeare’s version, which was inaccurate, was based on the work of the 16th- century English historian Raphael Hollinshead. In turn, Hollinshead borrowed from previous fanciful accounts of Macbeth dreaming of three sisters – the witches in the play – who murmured about his destiny. Banquo, famous for his feast, was the invention of another historian.So the performance should not conjure up any tortured spirits that might be residing at the castle, because the action never happened there. The real Macbeth was killed in 1057, but the present castle was not built until 1454 King Duncan lost no blood here and Lady Macbeth no sleep.. “Do not,” Marcus tells his brother, Titus Andronicus, “break into these deep extremes.” Crikey, even the most buttoned-up Brit might think a man’s entitled to moan after lopping off his hand to ransom two of his sons, and finding his daughter with both her hands chopped off and her tongue cut out?

“Do not,” Marcus tells his brother, Titus Andronicus, “break into these deep extremes.” Crikey, even the most buttoned-up Brit might think a man’s entitled to moan after lopping off his hand to ransom two of his sons, and finding his daughter with both her hands chopped off and her tongue cut out? Marcus, a nice old stick, is the Voice of Reason in Shakespeare’s reddest and blackest play, seldom heard and as briskly ignored as the pleas of the unjustly condemned before the whistle of the axe.
In Titus, Shakespeare’s first tragedy, the violence is unleavened by fine writing – in two-and-a-half hours, you won’t hear any quotations, apart perhaps from “Go, take him away, and kill him painfully,” which I’m sure must have been heard and remembered by Dr Fu Manchu. Phil Willmott has made an asset of this by setting his stunning production in the turbulent present.

When Titus kills his raped and mutilated daughter, announcing thereby an end to her shame and his sorrow, one recoils from a narcissistic brutality so antique, and then thinks: “Not in Bosnia.”The shifting alliances and ethics also strike a chord. Tamora, queen of the vanquished Goths, catches the emperor’s eye, and is transformed from degraded captive to empress of Rome. At the close, Titus’s son Lucius, the new emperor, denounces her for her lack of pity (she had spurred on her two sons to attack Lavinia); pretty rich, this, from the man who killed Tamora’s third son when they were prisoners of war and brought her his entrails in a bowl. Like morality, history belongs to whoever’s left standing.Willmott keeps a tight grip on the bloodletting, not letting it bludgeon us into indifference. The scene in which Lavinia sees her bridegroom murdered, then realises worse is in store, is particularly well imagined – as she begs for mercy, the two murderous morons respond with schoolyard taunts and, in a chilling touch, their mother, her blood up, pulls off her high heels and sprints across the stage to get in the first blow. Adam Keeper ratchets up the creepy ambience by bridging the scenes with sombre or eerie music, and Fiona Hankey contributes a handsome, menace-laden set of ivy dripping from floating cornices and bits of wall adorned with grasping hands and screaming heads. (Carving “REVENGE” six times on a central slab did, though, seem a tad unnecessary.)Gary Ross’s Titus is tough enough, but vocally monotonous, missing the heartbreak in the scene when, near mad with rage and grief, he reproaches a boy for killing a harmless fly.

And Matthew Brenher is far too easygoing as Aaron the Moor, the empress’s demon lover.The others do fine work, especially Libby Machin as the icy Tamora. This conception of the part, however, is a bit trite, and at odds with her grunting, yobbish sons. How I wish Willmott had taken full advantage of today’s news and patterned the role on the vulgar, pretentious Mrs Milosevic.To 5 August (020-7223 2223). Three surprise guests from the 21st century trespass into Jubilee, Peter Barnes’s rumbustiously satirical new play about Garrick’s great Stratford Jubilee of 1769. Mischievously impersonated by RSC actors, they are none other than Sir Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn CBE and Terry Hands, the first three directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Three surprise guests from the 21st century trespass into Jubilee, Peter Barnes’s rumbustiously satirical new play about Garrick’s great Stratford Jubilee of 1769. Mischievously impersonated by RSC actors, they are none other than Sir Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn CBE and Terry Hands, the first three directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In Greg Doran’s strenuously vibrant production, this trio arrive in a dream at a point when David Garrick, the foremost actor of the age, is dithering about the financial risk of mounting his epoch-making three-day celebration of the Bard.
Knowing that the Jubilee will lead directly to the creation of the multi-million dollar Shakespeare industry, and thus to the RSC and their own careers, these anxious big-shots are there to stop Garrick from changing his mind and to safeguard their own future existence. Oh, and also to make snide remarks about each other’s money, meanness and working methods. “I won’t starve, on cold winter nights, thanks to my, erm, my, erm ‘Memories’,” simpers Trevor, “But I still need the prestige”, while Terry agonises that they might have to get different jobs for which they’ve “no training, no experience and no aptitude”.As you’ll have gathered, Jubilee is not a play that is much inhibited by reverence. In fact, just about everything, apart from the generous-spirited Garrick, comes in for Barnes’s restless, broad-brushed disrespect – from the fact that not a single play of Shakespeare’s was performed in all the processions, masquerades, feasts and firework displays that were laid on for London’s toffs, to the philistine profiteering of the theatre-hating townsfolk who fleeced the visitors with sky-high “Jubilee prices”. Above all, in a climactic even-handed duel between Garrick and the critic George Steevens, Barnes questions the justice of canonising Shakespeare, a writer who (to his mind) managed, in plays such as The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew, to disguise moral squalor with honeyed words.The drawbacks of making a cult of genius and of turning culture into a heritage industry is a good subject, but the largely crude pantomime humour here fails to investigate it with the penetration it deserves.

It’s puerility rather than bracing blasphemy that’s on offer in scenes such as the one where, in a London steam room, Dr Johnson literally has a fit at the idea of the Jubilee, or where, as the rising Avon floods the festivities with sewage, a couple of Stratford yokels muse that, by comparison with them, Shakespeare “didn’t know shit”.There are incidental pleasures, like the spectacle of James Boswell shamelessly using the event to promote himself and his latest book, but even potentially forceful mock-Jonsonian episodes – as when a bawdy travesty of “Cleo and Tony” by a party of prostitutes convinces a sour puritan cleric that he has experienced a Pauline conversion to Shakespeare’s genius – fall flat through laboured overkill.Nicholas Woodeson exudes the good nature and protean energy of Garrick and he performs wittily virtuosic turns like breezing through a rapid medley of Shakespeare’s kings in the style of famous RSC actors. Such stunts, though, merely add to the sense that, too often here, polemical power is diffused in the atmosphere of an incestuous, end-of-term-style romp. As for seeing Stratford’s mercenary tourist mentality mocked in a Stratford theatre – well, the tight-fisted burghers gave Garrick the freedom of the town: Peter Barnes may be lucky to escape with a lynching.To 13 October (01789 403403). A great week for lovers of truth, in life and literature. On Thursday, the “novelist” who in the 1990s pocketed more than $50m from his admirers at Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins received his four-year stretch for perjury. Then, yesterday morning, the Court of Appeal refused the “historian” David Irving permission to challenge the damning judgment made at the close of his failed libel case against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.