Read Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (20 page)
The 1970s saw a massive cinematic revival of the revenge drama. These violent revenge horror films
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which emerged from America and the UK were largely an angry cry against the corruption that violence can have on the human soul—as demonstrated by the horrific acts that were being witnessed daily in television broadcasts from Vietnam. They were a brutal attempt to strip away the veneer of civilization and appropriation of the moral high ground by Western governments and turned into a national ethos after the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War. It’s notable that the RSC production of
Titus Andronicus
which contained the most realistic and bloody portrayal of violence was Trevor Nunn’s production of 1972. This artistic impulse, however, originates from much further back. One can look at the post–First World War works of the surrealists as a similar enterprise, and in theatrical terms, Grand Guignol and the work of Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” as attempts to uncover the reality behind civilization by means of horror and violence. In his work
Theatre and Its Double
, Artaud argued: “Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theatre is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”
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Ten years earlier, in 1955, Brook had brought
Titus Andronicus
to the Stratford stage for the first time. His landmark production starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh had a massive impact. In dealing with violence Brook used stylized stage techniques in order to demonstrate the symbolic nature of the play—large red ribbons were used instead of blood. The next time it was produced was seventeen years later when Trevor Nunn’s visceral interpretation hit the RSC stage in 1972 as part of “The Romans” season.
As a result of social, historical, artistic, and theatrical developments,
Titus
has suited the latter half of the twentieth and the current century well. To us now,
Titus
is not just a formulaic piece of revenge drama. Part of Shakespeare’s early genius is demonstrated
by his success in taking a known formula and creating a work that outdid his contemporaries. When he wrote
Titus
Shakespeare was “still in his twenties, is in his workshop, wrestling with several strands of tradition and trying to stamp on them a quality which is uniquely his own.”
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Just as the apprentice would create a formula piece, such as an infant’s high chair, so Shakespeare’s formula was to write within the style and structure of the revenge drama of the time. Performing within this structure one becomes increasingly aware of the genius of the writer.
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The arithmetic way in which the play works out its revenge was strikingly visualized in Yukio Ninagawa’s 2006 production performed as part of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival. Numbers and geometric lines were projected over the stage before the start of the play, covering the players and set. Costume rails were still onstage, the players warmed up, wandered loosely around, testing their voices. The director stood at the side directing operations, and instructions came over the PA system in Japanese and English for actors to take their places, for the centerpiece of the set design, a massive wolf statue, to be brought on, doors to be closed and the play to begin. This unusual opening highlighted the theatrical experience, and, by markedly closing the doors on the world outside, the audience also became part of the experience, immersing themselves in the world of the play, which in this instance was designed as a Gothic fantasy or beautiful nightmarish vision.
When the action onstage began, the visual formula gradually disappeared and the players took on their carefully choreographed and symbolic moves and stances—from chaos to structure. Ninagawa, like Shakespeare, created out of the revenge formula an astounding piece of theater in which the stylized acting techniques of the Japanese-speaking actors, coming from their traditions of theater reliant on formal physical movement, seemed completely in tune with Shakespeare’s intention. The visual intensity and the clear sense of the mechanism of the revenge drama created a powerful sense of
theatrical energy, which in its working out was deeply moving and inspiring.
Like many of Shakespeare’s plays
Titus
has rarely been performed in its entirety. It was not until Deborah Warner’s 1987 production that the play was performed uncut and “was treated as entirely trustworthy for the first time in its modern stage history”:
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The director had worked on the premise that everything in the text was there for a purpose, that the dramatist knew what he was about. There was even a degree of pedantry in her determination to test the text at every point with relentless rigour; yet the result was overwhelmingly impressive.
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Warner was aided by the staging of the play in the Swan Theatre—its structure purposefully designed to create the same dynamic between actor and audience as in an Elizabethan theater:
the Swan, as a reproduction of a Shakespearean theatre, is its ideal setting. At the Swan the audience is enveloped in the tragedy, rather than being distanced from it … With the barest of scenery and props, the play communicates so directly that theatregoers in the front rows occasionally flinch from all the stage blood and thunder.
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The intimacy of the space lent itself to a foregrounding of “the bonds between family, gender, and imperial dominion that the two earlier RSC productions obscured [1972 and 1981].”
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The play was not interested in “trying to recreate a place called Rome”:
Rather than overwhelming the stage with props which would realistically depict the play’s interiors, she and [designer Isabella] Bywater chose only a few deliberately unclassical objects—an aluminium ladder, an electric light bulb, a white chef’s toque—and used them tellingly. Bywater’s austere work responded to the theatre’s insistent physical exposure of actors and their playing to their audience in its refusal to erect distracting barriers between text and performance.
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For both directors and actors the nature of
Titus
as a play can erect distracting barriers: the extreme and symbolic violence, the very real possibility of unsolicited laughter. These staging issues have proved obstacles in productions of the play for the last fifty years.
One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses and oppresses.
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Titus Andronicus
is the closest Shakespeare comes to what may be described in a modern sense as
horror
. Repressed unnatural and violent behavior is given full reign as Roman society is overrun by “a wilderness of tigers.” Unlike other Shakespeare plays, when it is in performance, it is given a warning about its suitability for younger audiences. Murder, mutilation, rape, cannibalism are terms we associate with the most violent of so-called “video nasties,” not with the “Sweet Swan of Avon,” and as a result it has until recently remained on the margins of the performable canon. The central dilemma for any modern director of
Titus
is how to portray the violence. If you go for realism then you are struck by the unavoidable fact that Lavinia would bleed to death not long after her mutilation, plus you have the problem of fainting audience members. If you go for stylization, will the violence become too muted and softened to have the maximum impact necessitated by such extremities? In examination of this dilemma, Deborah Warner’s 1987 production and Ninagawa’s 2006 production act as advocates for alternative approaches.
The visceral nature of Warner’s production was eloquently described as a “caravan of horrors—amputation, decapitation, cannibalism and rape—arches in an unresolved manner like the horrors of a dream”;
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“In fact, the spectators who left the theatre … left or fainted not at the sight of Lavinia after her rape, but at the moment at which, just a few feet away from the audience Aaron cut Titus’ hand off with a cheese-wire.”
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It was the culmination of horrors up to this very graphic act that gave this moment its impact.
Warner avoided the use of excessive blood onstage, often substituting mud, so the impact of blood when it appeared was doubly shocking, as when Lavinia opens her mouth to reveal a stream of blood instead of a tongue and “at the end for the slaughter of Tamora’s sons in Titus’ back-kitchen—rolls of cloth soaked in the stuff suddenly appear.”
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The depiction of the rape of Lavinia was brutally cruel:
Whereas in the Swan season of 1987 Chiron stopped Lavinia’s mouth and dragged her off the stage to be raped, in the Barbican season the following year Chiron additionally put his hand under Lavinia’s dress and seemed to lift her up with his hand inside her, tossing her up and down to the accompaniment of her frightful cries. Lavinia’s return after the rape, on the other hand, remained fairly consistent throughout the run. Preceded by Demetrius and Chiron, who, giggling, crawled on stage in a cruel imitation of their maimed victim, Lavinia painfully pulled her body into the spotlight by her elbows. Her stumps, her hair and her once-golden dress were caked in mud (mud, during the first four acts, being the production’s substitute for blood). As the rapists collapsed on the ground laughing hysterically, she raised herself up, attempted to walk past them and fell down between them. Demetrius grabbed one of her stumps and waved it about to illustrate her “scrawling,” ridiculing her inability to speak. Meanwhile, Chiron spat in Lavinia’s face.
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In this, as in other productions, it is the stark visual contrast between the Lavinia we see before the rape and the wordless, brutalized, mutilated vision that we see after that has the impact. The violence that has been done to this woman does not need to be seen when it is so obvious in its results:
a lyrical speech is needed because it is only when an appropriately inappropriate language has been found that the sheer force of contrast between its beauty and Lavinia’s degradation begins to express that she has undergone and lost.
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3.
RSC 1987, directed by Deborah Warner. Photo shows Donald Sumpter (Marcus) cradling Lavinia (Sonia Ritter): “The Swan’s small size forced the audience to contemplate the spectacle of Lavinia’s victimization as her uncle spoke all forty-seven lines of his Ovidian lament.”
Warner stunned the audience into silence which was only broken by
murmurs of disturbed distress. The Swan’s small size forced the audience to contemplate the spectacle of Lavinia’s victimization as her uncle spoke all forty-seven lines of his Ovidian lament, trying to understand and accurately name what has happened to her.
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Marcus’ essential role within the play is to eloquently voice our thoughts in coming to terms with what we see onstage. Usually edited down, Deborah Warner kept all forty-seven lines of the speech:
spoken in Donald Sumpter’s hushed tones it became a deeply moving attempt to master the facts, and thus to overcome the emotional shock, of a previously unimagined horror. We had the sense of a suspension of time, as if the speech represented an articulation, necessarily extended in expression, of a sequence
of thoughts and emotions that might have taken no more than a second or two to flash through the character’s mind, like a bad dream.
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The revenge exacted on Demetrius and Chiron was an emotional release for the audience and also, symbolically, a release of blood. Brian Cox described how:
I was aware, as I played the scene with the boys, that members of the audience were thrilled that I had them, thrilled as I gripped their heads to expose their throats, thrilled at the revenge. The scene plays on certain yearnings in people, which is legitimate, truthful, and honest—and frightening … We held back in the production from showing much blood but here blood was spilled, unstintingly. To the horror, and to the delight, of the audience the blood of Demetrius and Chiron gushed into the bowl held between Lavinia’s stumps …
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In contrast, Yukio Ninagawa turned violence into a dark visual poetry. His completely stylized depiction of violence, rather than lessening the impact, made it deeply affecting. There was a poignancy in the contrast of beauty and violence which was also deeply disturbing and shocking. Ninagawa used no stage blood but returned to Peter Brook’s successful use of red ribbons to symbolize blood:
In Yukio Ninagawa’s cruelly beautiful Japanese production, the violence is totally stylised. Gore is represented by swatches of red cords that tumble and trail from wounded wrists and mouths. You might think that this method would have a cushioning effect. In fact, it concentrates and heightens the horror.
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