In “Titus Andronicus,” one of three Roman plays being staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theater in London, the director Blanche McIntyre taps into reserves of feeling rarely seen in other productions. Credit Helen Maybanks

LONDON — The Royal Shakespeare Company’s season of Roman plays would appear to put history first, as you might expect from two Shakespeare titles — “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra” — that tell the stories of actual people from a bygone age.

But it’s in the least-known title of this trio of plays, “Titus Andronicus,” that the emotions are also fully engaged. (The plays are running in repertory at the Barbican Theater through Jan. 20.) By that, I mean not just the revulsion and alarm that are the natural response to Titus’s grievous lot. The Roman general has lost 21 sons in combat before the play even begins, and the action unfolds amid a landscape of dismemberment and carnage that makes the cannibalism of “Sweeney Todd,” for instance, seem polite.

And yet, far from allowing Shakespeare’s first tragedy to settle into grand guignol or gross-out, the director Blanche McIntyre taps into reserves of feeling I haven’t often experienced in this play before. “I have not another tear to shed,” remarks the self-described “feeble ruin” that is Titus (David Troughton) somewhere around the time that his only daughter Lavinia (Hannah Morrish) has been mutilated in full view of the audience. (Let’s not dwell on the specifics.) From there, the production embraces gallows humor as Titus takes his demented revenge, chef’s hat and tasting spoon at the ready. Even then, to this production’s credit, we are never allowed to forget the bottomless despair that drives the character to extraordinary extremes.

Titus is a fictional creation, and the play that bears his name is often considered a collector’s item: a Quentin Tarantino-style exercise in sustained slaughter by a playwright who would go on to refine his shock tactics before arriving at the elevated realm of “King Lear,” the tragedy next to which “Titus” can often seem like a dry run. The blinding of Gloucester in that later play is a mere snip — you’ll forgive the image — compared with the atrocities in this one, where you feel the fledgling playwright pushing the boundaries of propriety. (It’s rare to find a play featuring a marauding duo called Rape and Murder.)

As Titus, Mr. Troughton, a bracingly intelligent, burly actor who should be more well known than he is, sounds wounding notes as befits a character with one constant in his life: loss.

At times, Ms. McIntyre indulges a flourish or two more than is necessary. The opening tumult, presumably intended to show a society in terminal disrepair, merely brings to mind the Sharks and the Jets: The faux-thuggishness is singularly unconvincing. Nor does it work when Mr. Troughton hands a baby (not a real one) into the audience. The breaking of the fourth wall is a distraction from Titus’s unraveling.

The happier news is that for much of its three-hour running time, the modern-dress production serves as a reminder of the glory days of high-definition acting that was once the R.S.C.’s norm. For all the excesses of the writing, Mr. Troughton is able to calibrate the degrees by which Titus surrenders to the baseness around him. “Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous,” Titus’s brother Marcus (Patrick Drury, excellent) advises near the start, only to watch as barbarity becomes the societal benchmark.

Josette Simon, who plays Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra,” brings a lissome sensuality to one of Shakespeare’s greatest female characters. Credit Helen Maybanks

“Antony and Cleopatra” is comparable in that it features a leading actor in assured control — in this case Josette Simon, who takes center stage as the Egyptian queen. Too long absent from the company where she began her career, Ms. Simon brings a lissome sensuality to one of Shakespeare’s greatest female characters — a part that tends to overshadow its Antony, notwithstanding the clarity that a robust Antony Byrne brings to the grizzled Roman general. (The role will be taken by no less a presence than Ralph Fiennes when the National Theater here tackles this same play later in the year.)

Adopting a playful, devil-may-care persona, Ms. Simon revels in the outsize posturing of a ruler who is also given some of Shakespeare’s most luxuriant language. Elsewhere, one is aware of a falling-off in the supporting roles, as if to suggest that the R.S.C. isn’t finding the strength in numbers in evidence when Mr. Fiennes was cutting his teeth at this company some years back. (Ben Allen’s Octavius Caesar, for one, is too earnest by half.)

The director, Iqbal Khan, retains period trappings — which is to say, togas and sandals aplenty — that here come tethered to a lushly exotic score by the British singer-songwriter Laura Mvula. And in Ms. Simon, a variable production boasts an ennobling presence that Shakespeare goes to some lengths to describe — “she did make defect perfection,” we are told — and that the audience can see right there before them.

A scene from “Julius Caesar,” the least interesting production of the triptych. Credit Helen Maybanks

Women play second fiddle in “Julius Caesar,” which also happens to be the least interesting of the triptych. It isn’t quite the revelatory window on the past or the present that we might have hoped for. A prequel of sorts to “Antony and Cleopatra,” with which it shares the central character of Antony, “Julius Caesar” offers a mostly male study in realpolitik that, in Angus Jackson’s becalmed production, leaves us wondering where the star equivalents to Ms. Simon and Mr. Troughton have got to this time.

Andrew Woodall’s Caesar is certainly a crisper, more commanding presence than is usual in a play whose title character gets bumped off fairly early on. But Alex Waldmann’s little-boy-lost Brutus is at physical and temperamental odds with such a grandly conspiratorial role. The same play will resurface here in London in a matter of weeks, at the director Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theater. My advice for the moment is to wait on “Julius Caesar,” but don’t let Ms. Simon or Mr. Troughton slip away.