Author Topic: There will be (fake) blood: five of the goriest theatrical bloodbaths  (Read 5236 times)

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Online Iain Fisher

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The Globe Theatre in London is showing a body Titus Andronicus which has audience members fainting.  The Guardian newspaper lists the bloodiest plays in London.

Sarah Kane's Blasted picked up the challenge of bringing the horrors of a war zone into a domestic setting, though most critics were initially squeamish and dismissive of Titus-like scenes of incestuous rape, eye-gouging and baby-burial under the floorboards. The play is now acclaimed as a modern classic, though that doesn't make it any easier to sit through.

Almost anything by Edward Bond
An Edward Bond season at the tiny Cock Tavern in Kilburn High Road in 2010 restored the author of the baby-stoning play, Saved (1965), to critical and public scrutiny.

American Psycho
American Psycho at the Almeida Theatre... was a nerve-shredding, almost nauseatingly chic musical version of a brilliant, hard-to-read novel. Blood was splattered all right, but with nice lighting and choreography: this was murder with designer labels and hatchets with handbags.

A View from the Bridge
"...an unexpected and really rather beautiful climactic bloodbath, a consequence of misguided passion in the lowliest of Brooklyn households."

Peter O'Toole's Macdeath
Peter O'Toole was generally derided for trying to restore Jacobean blood and thunder to his 1980 performance of Macbeth, which had people fainting with laughter rather than horror and revulsion.

The article is here
www.theguardian.com/stage/shortcuts/2014/may/05/five-onstage-bloodbaths