In April 1987 the Royal Shakespeare Company opened a production of Titus Andronicus at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, a theatre with a thrust stage and an audience capacity of 430. The play was the first to be directed for the RSC by Deborah Warner who had come to the company on the success of her Shakespeare productions with her own small touring company, Kick Theatre. There was no set other than the architectural form of the stage itself, no music other than that performed by the actors themselves (including a song from Walt Disney's Snow White whistled by Titus as he prepared to cook his monstrous pie). The costumes mixed styles from many periods and many contexts: the victorious Titus on his first entry wore Roman breastplate and modern trousers; for the final scene, he appeared 'like the chef de cuisine at a smart restaurant . . . in tall white chef 's hat and starched white overalls'. Warner did not cut a single line of the text and allowed the audience all the laughter that the play might provoke while also ensuring that it revealed all the horror that its violence demanded.

Warner’s Titus, as it became known, was a theatrical triumph, for many critics the finest Shakespeare production of the decade, but it also exemplifies many of the questions that need to be asked of any twentieth-century performance. The size of theatre, the shape of the stage, the experience of the director, the nature of the company, the choice of play, the decisions about set, music, and costumes, the range of emotional responses encouraged from the audience, the cutting of the text and the critical reception – not to mention the work of the actors themselves – are all crucial elements in our understanding of any Shakespeare production. This chapter does not offer a chronological account of Shakespeare performances this century; such accounts are available in some of the books listed at the end. Instead, it explores some of the problems and solutions, drawing heavily, though not exclusively, on examples from England.