Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens

by William Shakespeare

  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."24

  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.25

  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":26

  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.27

  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.28

  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]."29 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.30

  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.

  Staging Violence

  One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses and oppresses.31

  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";32 "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."33 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."34

  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.35

  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 i
t 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.36

  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.37

  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.38

  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 ... 39

  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.40

  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."41

  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."42 The production successfully turned "horror into visual poetry."43 In 1972 "[Trevor] Nunn chose extremely realistic detail, with accurate models of Chiron and Demetrius' severed heads."44 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."45

  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.46

  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":47

  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.48

  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."49

  Grotesque Laughter

  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.50

  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.51

  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.52

  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 Tarr
ant, 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.53

  The high camp of this production reminded one reviewer of the horror films of Roger Corman with "Patrick Stewart in the Vincent Price slot."54 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.55