I don't think Shakespeare liked dinner parties.

There are three of them in his plays, and none ends well. In Macbeth the host descends into a hallucinatory fit and yells defiance at a blood-stained ghost. In Timon of Athens he serves his guests bowls of warm piss. And in Titus Andronicus he makes meat pies out of the sons of his main guest and feeds them to her before slitting his own daughter’s throat.

Shakespeare's banquets are like George R. R. Martin’s weddings: bloody affairs where the awkward etiquette of a scenario we can all relate to transfigures into a scene of symbolic destruction. They are the dinner parties from hell.

And in Max Webster's production of Titus Andronicus for the RSC the dinner party is the blood-red icing on a cake of brooding familial agony, pitiless torture and barren, grey vistas. The horrors of that climactic scene are accentuated with poignantly original touches that deepen the tragedy and heighten the insanity. Titus’ mutilated daughter Lavinia fetches the knife herself, gripping it with her teeth and offering it to her father like a willing sacrifice. Tamora, mother of the eviscerated and bepastried rapists Chiron and Demetrius, on learning that she has been eating her own sons, laughs with unrestrained joy and chows down with renewed appetite. And it’s all accompanied by background muzak more suited to a prawn salad than a human barbecue.

As if that weren’t enough, the theatre, in an act of combined practicality and wicked foreboding, has handed out blood-proof rugs to the audience sitting in the first two rows, in a bid to stop people walking off through the streets of Stratford dripping gore on the Tudor cobbles. It’s thoughtful, but also gleefully alarming. I can’t be the first to say this, but Max Webster is clearly much possessed by death.

Titus Andronicus may be Shakespeare’s – and quite possibly the world’s – most horrific play. But as it turns out, this production, despite its chainsaws, buckets of blood and dripping corpses, succeeds in being one of the most restrained interpretations I’ve ever seen. The last time it was performed in Stratford, with David Troughton, the effect of Titus’ hand being sawn off was virtually real. You saw the blade penetrate the flesh, and the fingers quiver as the nerve-endings broke apart beneath the rending teeth. The violence in Webster’s vision is more expressionistic, with assailants clearly separated from their victims, and blood flung by nearby characters. While the cruelty is front and centre, the physicality is half-enacted and half-implied. It’s not so much on a rack but on the torture of the mind that Simon Russell Beale lies in restless ecstasy.

And what ecstasy! Russell Beale has the insight, sensitivity and depth of knowledge to reinvent every Shakespearean part he plays as if he’s approaching it from first principles. Titus, normally a bruiser barely more civilised than the Goths he has brought back to Rome in chains, becomes, in Russell Beale’s hands, an old man tired of war. He has been fighting for forty years. He’s lost countless sons in battle. He’s seen every horror you could imagine, and it’s left him dead from the neck down. What we are watching is not a man being put unexpectedly through ultimate torment, but a man who, tragically, is used to it. This is hell, nor is he out of it.

Russell Beale’s Titus is no longer a fighter. He struggles to step up onto the stage, and, tellingly, the production has excised the moment when he kills his own son for barring his way. Even his attack on the famous little fly is impotent and ineffective. Instead of anger, this is a Titus caught in the grip of depression. And ironically, it is only when he learns that his daughter has been raped that his numb carapace finally breaks, and he resolves to fight back. He has at last discovered a new depth of pain, and his whisper on learning the truth, ‘Oh, Lavinia’, is more powerful than any yells of rage.

Grief rises to the surface in this production. It fills the room up. It’s like an unstoppable, rising tide. And images of water abound, symbolic of the overpowering waves of grief buffeting Titus. Tears, tributaries, the Nile overspilling its banks, a wilderness of sea, floods, fountains and brine-pits – Russell Beale invokes them all. And at the end the characters slouch off to oblivion in a downpour of fire sprinklers, soaked with the world’s tears.

The design reflects the sparse emptiness of Titus' soul: a bare, paved square, dark and uncompromising. It's so utilitarian that pieces of scenery are only brought on when needed. A construction gantry wheels into place and lowers ropes, shackles or prison roofs when called into service by the cast. It's not so much a set design as an automated delivery service for torture equipment.

After recent RSC productions that went with a pre-devised high concept (Hamlet on The Titanic, Much Ado About Nothing in the San Ciro), Webster’s Titus is refreshingly devoid of the conceptual limitations of One Big Idea. Instead, this has the unmistakeable aura of a show that was made in the rehearsal room. Those touches I mentioned earlier, like Tamora eating more voraciously on learning that her own sons are the dinner, are the results of actors diving deep into their roles and discovering new perspectives. These are ideas that come from creative interaction, not just taking instructions. There’s a shocking moment early in the play when Tamora (played with single-minded, cruel instinct by Wendy Kweh, burning with pent-up energy like Ted Hughes’ Crow in human form) sucks the Emperor Saturninus’ finger into her mouth. It’s both erotic and cannibalistic, and with its hint of danger foreshadows the fate of so many fingers in this play.

For a writer in Elizabethan England, losing one’s hands was akin to losing one’s career. So for Shakespeare, the parade of handless characters in Titus Andronicus is like a vision of death. No hand, no writing. No writing, no play. No play, no Shakespeare. It is the ultimate sacrifice.

Alongside Kweh and Russell Beale, Emma Fielding brings a vital element of grounded common sense to Martia. And Natey Jones, as the ultimate villain Aaron, has an incandescent sexual energy that makes him both unspeakably cruel and impossible to kill.

In giving us this sobering, intelligent vision of what has traditionally been a crazy blood-fest, Webster and Russell Beale are continuing the rehabilitation of Titus Andronicus, and bringing it from the status of almost a laughable embarrassment to being one of Shakespeare’s greatest works.

It’s not a perfect production. For me, the dead characters metamorphosing into animalistic, chimp-like zombies have overtones of punk fairies from a 1980s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and they work against the intense focus of the rest of the performances. And the absence of any recognisable setting at all sometimes has an unfinished feel about it.

But what comes across most clearly in this production, and feels so horribly contemporary that it raises your hackles in despair, is the merciless violence of bipartisan hatred. Time and again, characters are killed or dismembered without even the faintest flicker of mercy. As enemies, they are beneath any form of humane treatment. And where does it lead? Revenge. Ever greater cruelty. A peace no nearer today than it was in the Roman Empire. Simon Russell Beale opens the second half by looking at his disfigured daughter and saying, with petulant disgust, ‘So? So?’ He isn’t just asking her what to do next. He’s asking us what the point is in bewailing the suffering of mankind. It never ends.