Read Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (21 page)
The design of the production made it clear that the world these people inhabited was a brutal one:
It’s the model of a huge she-wolf, complete with Romulus and Remus suckling vulpine milk at her breasts while she herself
bares her long, jagged teeth at the world. Could there be a more telling symbol of Rome as Shakespeare defined it in his most preposterously gory play? … Feral people do brutal things, sometimes looking like slightly furry samurai, occasionally dressed in skins borrowed from the jungle, including the animal the title-character has in mind when he calls Rome “a wilderness of tigers.”
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Nevertheless, there was a terrible artistic beauty to the spectacle presented, “ ‘Chrysanthemums and butchery’ was a famous German critic’s summation of classical Japanese theatre.”
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The production successfully turned “horror into visual poetry.”
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In 1972 “[Trevor] Nunn chose extremely realistic detail, with accurate models of Chiron and Demetrius’ severed heads.”
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In Ninagawa’s production when Titus returns from battle at the start of the play, “his dead sons’ corpses, made from surprisingly sinister shy Perspex, are borne in glass coffins reminiscent of Damien Hirst installations.”
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4.
RSC 1972, directed by Trevor Nunn with Ian Hogg as Lucius, Janet Suzman as Lavinia, and Colin Blakely as Titus: “Nunn chose extremely realistic detail, with accurate models of Chiron and Demetrius’ severed heads.”
Ninagawa’s dreamlike vision marked out the key line in the play as “When will this fearful slumber have an end?”
Titus may be Shakespeare’s apprentice melodrama but, as revived by Ninagawa, it’s also a nightmare that goes on and on, however much the sleeper tries to wake: mad yet gripping, and maybe, telling us something about ourselves and our own grim, dangerous world.
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This image of the beautiful nightmare was strikingly evident in the scenes where the action moved into the woods. Ninagawa’s breathtaking sets were predominantly white throughout. The forest emerged magically in a seamless piece of set changing; “Indeed, it might be a fairytale forest, full of waist-high, spreading leaves on delicately bobbing stalks”:
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when Lavinia’s rape and off-stage mutilation and the murder of her husband Bassianus are effected in a dream-struck, dazzling white woodland of unnatural beauty where mushroom-like plants grow as tall as humans, the effect is grotesquely disturbing … Ninagawa sees the play’s barbarities as the equivalent or suitable correlative to our own brutalised, morally defective world, with its terrorism, beheadings, and tortured corpses. The key to his concept is Shakespeare’s evocation of Rome as “a wilderness of tigers” and Titus’ sense of life as the “fearful slumber”—of a nightmare. The snarling, guttural, white-robed warriors guarding or killing their chained prisoners are dehumanised: wolfish, tigerish and, in the case of Tamora’s depraved sons, dog-like.
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So much of the pain and violence in
Titus
, like the reaction to any atrocity, is beyond words. At the end of this production, Ninagawa offered us a devastating image—man as animal, howling at the world. It was “a moment of ambiguous hope. Titus’ grandson Lucius takes pity on Aaron’s baby and cradles it in his arms. In protest at the horror, the boy lets out a series of howls. A cause for optimism, perhaps, in demonstrating that he’s not been desensitised by atrocity.”
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If the violence on stage is funny, then the part of the play that is about how extraordinarily cruel people can be to one another is rendered meaningless. But there are moments within the violence that touch on humour, as when Aaron tells Titus that if Titus sends the Emperor Saturninus his hand, there will be a stay of execution for his sons and they will be sent back to Titus alive. There then ensues an argument between Titus, his brother and his son about who should chop their hand off—all three of them very, very enthusiastic that it should be theirs. It’s a moving moment but one you have carefully to control. Sometimes, if you can laugh at the right moments within the parts of the play that are violent, it helps a sense of pity to evolve and makes you sympathetic to the real human condition being described.
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Despite the play’s reputation as an unrelenting gore-fest, laughter plays an important part in
Titus Andronicus
. Due to the nature of the play this laughter is often unintentional. With horror topping horror, if badly staged the effect can be unfortunately comic. In John Barton’s drastically cut production of 1981:
we are watching an Elizabethan company of players, performing on a stage furnished only with costumes—baskets, frames for hanging properties and make-up tables where actors fuss with hair and make-up. The whole troupe is on stage throughout, giggling or spying on the action … although the directorial concept is obviously designed to remind us of the dramatic conventions of its period (and it succeeds in doing so) it does not prevent some of the horrors from being received by the audience with quiet but persistent merriment.
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A soldiers’ camp signified by actors in pantomime horses, pots of limp greenery brought in from the wings when “ruthless” woods are required, and manic glee from the Titus of Patrick Stewart as he stirs up the sons of Tamora in a pie, all draw laughter that seems wholly expected by the company.
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5.
RSC 1981. John Barton’s “high camp” production attempted “to style the play in the fashion of one of Shakespeare’s darker comedies”: Demetrius (Roger Allam, left), Tamora (Sheila Hancock), Chiron (Colin Tarrant, right), and Aaron (Hugh Quarshie).
Titus Andronicus
was played in an unlikely double bill with the early Shakespearean comedy
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, leading one critic to comment:
the plot borders on farce. And after sitting through two hours of hand-lopping, tongue gouging and mayhem in which no fewer than ten of the play’s main characters meet very unpleasant ends the audience needed a play at which it could laugh legitimately.
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The high camp of this production reminded one reviewer of the horror films of Roger Corman with “Patrick Stewart in the Vincent Price slot.”
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It appears that Barton, aware of the potential for laughter, was trying to style the play in the fashion of one of Shakespeare’s darker comedies. The attempt to move the play from one genre to another led to a confused audience response. Many of the more extreme scenes in
Titus
need to be handled with great care to avoid this reaction. In Deborah Warner’s 1987 production:
Inappropriate laughter was avoided by the exploitation of all the genuine comedy latent in the text—along with a little that Shakespeare had not thought of. Brian Cox established Titus as a credible, human character by making him a bit of a card—an odd, shambling hero, very much a law unto himself. In the opening scene he started to paw Tamora, then slapped his cheek as if to remind himself of his unburied sons … he stuffed his fingers into his ears, pretending not to hear his brother and sons pleading for Mutius’ burial. Estelle Kohler, as Tamora, and her two sons played her bombastic accusation of Bassianus as if it were a burlesque playlet put on for their victims’ entertainment; Demetrius’ sudden stabbing of Bassianus seemed all the more horrific as a result. Acknowledgement of the comedy in the situation when Titus, Lucius, and Marcus squabble over who shall have the honour of losing a hand in the hope of saving Titus’ sons intensified the pain of the moment when Titus outwits the others by getting Aaron to mutilate him while they have gone to fetch an axe.
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Use of a chorus as a stage device also helped direct audience reaction with physical movements signaling appropriate responses to the action:
The chorus of servants played its part, squatting in ranks to each side of the stage before the pie was served (“Welcome, all,” said Titus to the inhabitants of the pie, with a last touch of macabre humour), stretching forward in horror at the death of
Lavinia, bending as Titus stabbed Tamora, gasping as Saturninus killed Titus, and finally rushing off through the audience as Lucius killed the Emperor.
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Warner’s most outrageous touch of stage comedy was to use the soundtrack to Disney’s
Snow White
. Brian Cox recalled:
it was decided that the company should whistle the tune (“Hi-Ho” from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
) as the banquet is prepared. It was a risk, but I believe one worth taking—once again for its contribution to the play’s sense of the ludicrous. It was also unsettling, and at this point it is important to unsettle the audience, to create something from a different space, a different place, a different genre … then, in full starched white chef’s garb, I came in, leaping over the table, with the pie. The world had gone crazy; the audience’s embarrassment about serving the boys in the pie was released in laughter … The play has constantly walked the borderline between horror and laughter … “Why, there they are, both baked in this pie; / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed” [5.3.60–61]. Sometimes that got a laugh, sometimes none at all. And then Tamora laughs in disbelief, and Titus laughs at her disbelief, and the audience is released to laugh again, only to be silenced by the terrible suddenness of the deaths. The real sensation of that was quite extraordinary, the visceral sense of it for the audience.
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Brian Cox as Titus became the central comic/tragic figure, blending “horror and burlesque … [revealing] the play as a text about the abuses of power,”
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also “reminding the audience of the grim humorousness of the obscene.”
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Warner used the black comedy inherent in the play, and highlighted rather than shied away from the comedy generated by the extreme moments of grotesque gore. In addition to this her addition of extra comic moments provided an emotional contrast to the horror of the play:
The ritual that ended the scene, including a flip of one head to Marcus and the giving of the hand to Lavinia (which she placed in her mouth and quickly enveloped with her stumps) did elicit some audience laughs, but, given the preparation in 1.1 and the long build in this scene, by this point shock, irony, and laughter were so intermingled that no “normal” reactions were possible. The effect was stunning.
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In 2003, director Bill Alexander was also aware of the importance of controlling the audience response to genuine and potentially unwanted moments of humor. With death after death in the final scene, he avoided laughter by altering the pace of the violence. David Bradley, who played Titus, explained:
[Alexander] wanted to invite laughter at certain times and then chop it. He wanted to be in control of the laughter and thought it would be rather sad if, having taken an audience through that whole story, the play ended in some kind of Gothic horror, Hammer House of Horror, or Tarantino-esque laughter. Sometimes during previews, the audience were laughing and we weren’t sure if they were laughing at us or with us, for example during the three deaths at the end … The audience are stunned and shocked into a gasp by the death of Lavinia, which is wonderfully exciting to hear and then they laugh at the pie, which is good. That’s welcome laughter but then you want to stop it. So we found that if we … had Lucius slowly walking over to a trapped Saturninus and stabbing him, there was total silence.
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Alexander’s production didn’t add to the humor inherent in the text with any extra characters or unscripted business. The mingling of tragedy with laughter in his production elicited compassion for the characters: “The staging is simple, somber, the acting measured, careful. A vast mask hovers over the proceedings, an archaic smile or smirk beneath its black, empty eyes. It’s some god, relishing what might be a sneak preview of Lear.”
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The comedy was subtle and
based in realistic human response. Titus’ family were made real to the audience by punctuating the horror with small details of everyday humor. The effect was to emphasize the poignancy of recognizable people dealing with extremity: “even at the height of the carnage, after Titus has seen his daughter raped and two more sons killed, he can’t resist bopping his brother over the head with his surviving hand.”
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Reviewing the production, Paul Taylor pointed out the touching effectiveness of: