Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (19 page)
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Authors: William Shakespeare
IN PERFORMANCE:
THE RSC AND BEYOND
The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.
We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.
Finally, we go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.
TITUS ANDRONICUS:
AN OVERVIEW
To judge from the number of early recorded performances and contemporary references, Shakespeare’s first essay in tragedy, written in
the late 1580s–early 1590s, enjoyed immediate popular success. In his Diary
3
Philip Henslowe records a performance on January 23, 1594, by the Earl of Sussex’s Men with further performances on January 28 and February 6. Later that year Henslowe’s Admiral’s Men combined with Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, to present the play at the Newington Butts Theatre on June 5 and 12. A private performance, most likely by the Chamberlain’s Men, was given at the home of Sir John Harington of Exton on January 1, 1596, described by the French tutor in a private letter as notable for “la monstre” (the spectacle) which he considered of more value than “le sujet” (the subject).
Ben Jonson’s slighting reference in the Induction to
Bartholomew Fair
(1614) indicates that the play remained in the popular repertory, along with Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy
, despite Jonson’s view that it was now outdated:
He that will swear Heronimo or Andronicus are the best plays, yet shall pass unexcepted at, here, as a man whose judgement shews it is constant, and hath stood still, these five and twenty, or thirty years.
A contemporary drawing by writer and artist Henry Peacham gives a unique picture of the play’s earliest staging. While it doesn’t appear to illustrate any specific scene, Peacham includes quotations from the first and last acts and clearly features the main characters in poses that seem to “offer an emblematic reading of the whole play.”
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The play’s popularity waned, however, as public tastes changed and the conviction grew among a number of scholars that Shakespeare could not have been responsible for its bloody excesses; Shakespeare’s text was not performed again until the twentieth century, when violence and horror were once more seen as fit theatrical subject matter.
After the Restoration and reopening of the theaters in 1660 a variety of adaptations were staged, the first of which was Edward Ravenscroft’s
Titus Andronicus
, or
The Rape of Lavinia
(c. 1678). In this the role of Aaron was amplified and the play ended with his confession and fiery death. It was a favorite role of the tragedian James Quin and continued to be popular with actors into the nineteenth century. It was the African American actor Ira Aldridge who turned it into a star vehicle though in an adaptation by C. A. Somerset in which Aaron was “elevated into a noble and lofty character”
5
to become the tragic hero. Another American, the actor-playwright N. H. Bannister, also adapted the play and staged it for four nights at the Walnut Street theater in Philadelphia in 1839, having carefully excluded its “horrors” and “offensive expressions.”
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1.
Henry Peacham’s illustration of
Titus Andronicus
with two soldiers on the left, Titus center left, Tamora center right, her sons kneeling and Aaron, with sword drawn, far right (c. 1604–15).
The director Robert Atkins, influenced by William Poel and his desire to recreate original Elizabethan stagings of Shakespeare’s plays, mounted a production of
Titus Andronicus
at the Old Vic in 1923. Despite acknowledgment of its theatrical power and some critical acclaim,
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the deaths in the final scene produced unwelcome laughter. The following year John M. Berdan and E. M. Woolley directed a group of students from Yale in a production which the critic Tucker Brooke conceded revealed “what a tremendous interest the acted story developed.”
8
Capitalizing on the play’s violent excesses, Kenneth Tynan and Peter Myers produced a “really splendid”
9
thirty-minute version for a program of Grand Guignol at London’s Irving Theatre in 1951. But
it was Peter Brook’s 1955 production at the Stratford Memorial Theatre with Laurence Olivier as Titus, Maxine Audley as Tamora, Anthony Quayle as Aaron, and Vivien Leigh as Lavinia which was finally to establish the play’s place in the modern Shakespearean repertory, despite some critical carping: “The grizzly, senseless map of horror has been unrolled, and now we can roll it up again for another fifty years.”
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However, Jan Kott, the Polish critic and academic, recognized what Brook’s judicious cutting had done for the play:
Mr. Brook has composed his
Titus Andronicus
not of scenes, but of shots and sequences. In his production tension is evenly distributed, there are no “empty places.” He has cut the text but developed the action. He has created sequences of great dramatic images. He has found again in Shakespeare the long-lost thrilling spectacle.
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Brook not only cut the text but employed now famous techniques for stylizing the violence and gore, replacing them with flowing scarlet ribbons. There was unanimous praise for a strong cast, but it was Olivier’s Titus who attracted the greatest plaudits for a performance regarded by many as definitive:
Titus enters not as a beaming hero but as a battered veteran, stubborn and shambling, long past caring about the people’s cheers. A hundred campaigns have tanned his heart to leather, and from the cracking of that heart there issues a terrible music, not untinged by madness. One hears great cries, which, like all of this actor’s best effects, seem to have been dredged up from an ocean of fatigue. One recognized, though one had never heard it before, the noise made in its last extremity by the cornered human soul.
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Since Brook’s landmark production, the play has been staged with greater regularity and directors have employed a variety of techniques to overcome its perceived difficulties, frequently resorting to stylization and suggestion rather than presenting violence and gore directly. In 1966 Douglas Seale directed a production at the Center Stage in Baltimore which transported the play to Mussolini’s Rome. The following year Gerald Freedman directed the play for Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival at the outdoor Delacorte Theatre in New York’s Central Park. Like Brook, Freedman eschewed realism and blood in favor of ritual to produce “a real spectacle, not showy, noisy or eccentric but one in the mode of a liturgy which could have been devised by Antonin Artaud. The result was total theater.”
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Brian Bedford’s 1978 production for the Stratford Festival, Ontario, was praised for its “clarity and lucidity,” although the “restraint” and “control” exercised by the director “incurred losses in passages that called for greater voltage.”
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Terence O’Brien’s 1999 production for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival played “the curious piece of Elizabethan Grand Guignol completely straight. Well, maybe not completely; the blood is made to gush so vehemently from the necks of the victims that an audience raised on the shock value of cinematic gore has no recourse but to laugh at times”:
2.
RSC 1955, directed by Peter Brook: Titus (Laurence Olivier) and Marcus (Alan Webb) watch Lavinia (Vivien Leigh) write the name of her attackers: Brook employed now famous techniques for stylizing the violence and gore.
The final scene, one of the story’s goriest and here the most stylized, is staged Sam Peckinpah–style, in slow motion. A bladder filled with stage blood, visible to the audience, is passed from one dying character to the next. This neat device is an acknowledgment of how sophisticated movie and playgoers have become in their responses to orchestrated mayhem of the most graphic kind.
15
The mood of James Edmondson’s 2002 production for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was described as “relentlessly dark,” and while not updating the play’s setting, his program notes quoted this chilling epigraph from a contemporary news report, spoken by an anonymous father in the Middle East conflict: “If you kill our children, we will kill your children.”
16
Despite Gregory Doran’s denial of any overt political intent, his 1995 South African production with Antony Sher as Titus (discussed below in the Director’s Cut), later brought to London’s National Theatre, was also seen in the light of contemporary politics.
17
The Globe stage was draped in black with a Colosseum-style awning or
velarium
over the yard for Lucy Bailey’s powerful 2006 production. The design reminded one critic of “Fellini’s film
Satyricon
(1969) which provided a grotesque glimpse of a depraved Rome imploding in excess and decadence.”
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The numerous film references made by critics in recent years when discussing the play suggest an awareness of its filmic possibilities.
Jane Howell’s BBC production (1985) is widely regarded as one of the most successful of the series, praised for its lack of sensationalism and noted for reimagining the play through the eyes of the Young Lucius—a device adopted by Julie Taymor in her film
Titus
(1999). While Taymor’s film “retains the play’s Roman Empire setting, it also makes quantum but seamless leaps into an unexpected and thematically reverberating variety of time periods, from the present day, to Mussolini’s (and then Fellini’s) Italy, and today’s Bosnia.”
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Her bravura treatment has attracted both praise and blame:
The film production is marked by gross indulgences and hideous excesses, but it is sometimes shockingly effective and even darkly humorous … The horrors of Shakespeare’s play are framed through a coming-of-age metaphor as Young Lucius passes from innocence to experience … His final exit out of the Coliseum towards the dawning of a new day with evil Aaron’s baby in arms symbolically is a journey towards redemption, giving the film its own distinctive closure.
20
Unmasking Civilization
Titus Andronicus
, Shakespeare’s earliest and goriest tragedy, was a smash hit in its day, but then it toppled into centuries of disrepute and neglect. Since the Second World War, though, its fortunes have risen. Partly, this is because the pile-up of atrocities in the piece no longer seems implausible after the mass horrors of the 20th century. Partly it’s thanks to great directors who have demonstrated that the play is less about violence than about the effects of unspeakable suffering and grief.
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There is a tendency for modern readers to patronize the past. To say of Elizabethan and Tudor times that they lived in a more violent and dangerous period and, therefore, the extremity of the revenge drama is an example of that impulse that drove people to watch executions and bearbaiting. Yet, as Paul Taylor points out in the extract
from his review above,
Titus Andronicus
, and indeed the revenge drama as a form, have in the last fifty years witnessed an unprecedented revival—one only matched by their initial popularity in the seventeenth century.