CAST INCLUDED: George Anton (Titus); Thomas Cotran (Demetrius); Conor Hinds (Chiron); Tunji Lucas (Aaron); Thierry Mabonga (Bassianus); Alison Peebles (Marcia [Marcus]); Chloe-Ann Taylor (Lavinia); Emily Winter (Tamora).

This production ran from 8 - 24 April 2015. Information taken from the Dundee Rep website and Theatre Record; may be incomplete.

"The knives and pretty much everything else are out in this radical reboot of what is probably Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy...'Rome' becomes the sort of voguish open-plan restaurant beloved of European cities and fans of urban regeneration. In this environment, built magnificently into Dundee Rep's rarely used Bonar Hall space, the audience become the hungry diners sat at long wooden tables witnessing a political system in meltdown as portraits of former demagogues line the wall. As assorted kitchen staff from all factions neck shots and dance on tables to JD Twitch's pumping techno soundtrack, at first what looks like after-hours fun for minimum wage slaves gets seriously out of hand. As Tamora's sons rape Titus' daughter Lavinia, hands are chopped off, tongues cut out and corpses piled into a wheelie bin along with the bin bags and empty bottles in a way that suggests that's just for starters. Co-produced by Dundee Rep Ensemble and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Howard and Laing's version puts some of the play's goriest excesses on film, beamed onto the wall like mobile phone shot snuff movies shared on YouTube."  ~ Neil Cooper, Herald, 13 April 2015.

"As we enter, we see that the Bonar Hall at Dundee Rep has been transformed. It's become a restaurant called Rome, one of those huge, frightening state-of-the-art eating-places where the diners sit at long tables down either side, while in the middle, on gleaming stainless-steel benches, the chefs chop, slice, and sizzle, in full view of their customers-turned-audience. More, it's a restaurant that goes for a touch of retro Soviet chic; the near wall, by the door, offers a ten-metre shrine of idealised, colour-tinted images of Soviet heroes, butchers and tyrants. And if, for much of the play, this restaurant setting remains only a backdrop to Shakespeare's notoriously violent early tragedy - a ready source of knives, water, and other instruments of torture - the imagery of boiling and butchery returns with a vengeance at the play's end, vindicating all the radical choices made by acclaimed Scottish director Stewart Laing..."  ~ Joyce McMillan, Scotsman, 13 April 2015

"Winter is wonderfully imperious as the Goth queen, with Tunji Lucas also menacing and seductive as her scheming lover, Aaron" ~ Allan Radcliffe, The Times, 16 April 2015

"The cast, which combines professional actors with second-year undergraduate acting students from the Conservatoire, is more unexen among the pros than the students (who quit themselves well overall). George Anton excels as a savage but increasingly sentient Andronicus, as do Alison Peebles as the warrior's clever and remorseless sister Marcia, and Tunji Lucas as Tamora's unrepentant, Moorish lover Aaron."  ~ Mark Brown, Sunday Herald, 19 April 2015