SHORT of staging Titus Andronicus: The Musical, with Queen's Another One Bites The Dust as its signature tune, it would be impossible to make the bloody hell of Shakespeare's most violent play a box-office draw at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre.

The prospect of seeing a play about rape, murder, dismemberment and pie-eating cannibalism had kept the masses at home, chomping on a diet of lighter, less fattening horrors, otherwise known as British soap opera.

It takes a strong stomach to survive Titus Andronicus intact, but no more so than a night out at a Greek tragedy or, more topically, at the latest Tarantino bloodbath, Kill Bill Vol. 2.

The comparison with Tarantino is apt. Titus Andronicus was written by Renaissance dramatist Will Shakespeare in his bravura days. He had already knocked off a handful of history plays and comedies, and, as he turned 30 with chief rival Christopher Marlowe newly dead, he took the chance to out do the new pretenders with a show of video nasty excess.

Titus Andronicus was his Reservoir Dogs, the satire of the dead-fly speech his equivalent to Tarantino's "dogs" dissecting Madonna's merits.

Yet Titus Andronicus is no Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne shock show; its expressions of grief are the stuff of classical Greek drama, and Paul Toy's icily discharged production seeks to balance those moments of pained stillness with the inexorable crunch of revenging tragedy.

Incense and candlelight and Jude Brereton's Eastern percussion playing set the scene for Toy's transfer of the play from Rome to the Far East: "another highly sophisticated, decadent and cruel empire menaced on its borders by warring tribes; a society with a strict judicial system that involves executions and mutilations, strong ritual and ceremonial traditions and a culture of heightened poetic speech," as his programme notes expound.

His scholarly reasoning reads well, and it looks well on John Sharpe's Chinese set design, complemented by the colour-coded costume designs of Beverley Chapman. Toy's judicious editing keeps the running time to two-and-a-half hours, and the relentless progression of bloody deeds culminates in the forensic detail of the neck-slashing execution of Demetrius (Oliver Bevan) and Chiron (Alex Ball), hung upside down like pigs in an abattoir.

As is the way with community productions, the standard of acting is erratic and, in truth, this most difficult of plays over stretches the company, although David Parkinson's righteous Titus and Richard Easterbrook's wise old owl Marcus Andronicus cut the mustard.

Titus Andronicus lain to rest, York Shakespeare Project will have more fun and surely bigger houses for Chris Rawson's production of Love's Labours Lost at the Friargate Theatre in December.

Updated: 11:43 Thursday, April 22, 2004