Audience members fainting at scenes of rape, mutilation and murder at Shakespeare's Globe during its current production of Titus Andronicus offer a reassuring reminder of the power of physical aggression in the theatre. Though it's worth remembering that, in hot weather, they faint a lot anyway at that Bankside open air cockpit; I've seen people pass out at Love's Labour's Lost, for heaven's sake. But spilt blood and guts are what the Greek and Jacobean theatre were all about, with offstage violence and neutralising masks in the former and buckets of red stuff splashing all over the groundlings in the latter. And how refreshing it is to see such stomach-churning atrocity in the theatre, where it rightly belongs, rather than on depressing newsreels from around the world. Here are five more on-stage bloodbaths capable of sending the audience rushing for the exit.
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