Seriously bloody
Patrick Camegy
Titus Andronicus Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in repertoire until 7 November
It might perhaps have been no more than coincidence that the RSC's riverside restaurant was serving beef-and-mushroom pie before the first night of Shakespeare's earliest, bloodiest and least performed tragedy. But recalling the popcorn toted not so long ago in the foyers by gaily costumed vendors at an Americanstyle RSC Winter's Tale, such thematic fare seemed at the very least tactless. For the stabbings, rape and amputations in Titus Andronicus famously build towards a banquet at which a mother is served the flesh of her sons baked up in just the kind of pie which heedless first-nighters were tucking into before the show.
Some have seen the play's blood-lettings as Shakespeare parodying the violence found in the efforts of his contemporaries, or even as burlesquing that in his own Henri VI trilogy. Be that as it may, the best productions in living memory have made the case for Titus as a tragedy which, however imperfect, reaches forward to Othello and to Lear. This surely has to be right, for however gratuitous the violence may seem, it was no laughing matter for its Elizabethan audience, habituated as it was to public executions which began with the amputation of genitals and continued with partial hanging, the excision of entrails and the quartering of limbs.
Bill Alexander's production is in the unflinchingly serious mode. Its strategy is to curb all potentially excessive rhetoric, to cool the many passages that can so easily come across as overheated. The emphasis is on the sorrows of Titus, not on his anger. His stoicism and that of the sorry remnant of his family is set against the manic excitability of his enemies. It's a strategy that casts the play in a compelling new light.
At its centre is David Bradley's introspective, almost monastic Titus, indeed so much so that he's sometimes in danger of confessing his lines to himself rather than sharing them with us. But for the most part the sense of stillness and concentration really does give tragic stature to the role. And it generates almost unbearably moving moments, as in the contrast between
the stunned incoherence of Titus's verbal response to his first sight of his maimed daughter Lavinia and the eloquence of the excellent Eve Myles's terrible writhings, her whimperings and inconsolable cries.
As Titus wearily shuffles forward with his captive Goths, he seems as much [11_6 ri
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among the condemned as they. Rome's saviour he may be, but one so totally broken by the wars and loss of all but four of his 25 sons that his triumphs are hollow, his appetite for power so nullified and his judgment so fatigued that he cedes the throne to its least suitable claimant, the appalling Saturninus. Even as he wearily agrees to make the human-sacrifice to Jupiter required of the victor — his fatal mistake — he knows that Heaven is empty and that Justice has fled the earth. Later, Bradley rises superbly to Titus's wild inspiration of commanding his followers to shoot arrows to carry his prayers into the firmament, perhaps hoping that even at this impossible hour, divine intervention might yet save him from exacting his revenge.
The palpable energy in the production is reserved to those pitted against Titus. As Saturninus, John Lloyd Fillingham is the spoilt, wilful child, demanding the Empire as his toy and Tamora, Queen of the vanquished Goths (Maureen Beattie), as his wife. But it's she who immediately sees that her role will be that of 'nurse and mother', vigorously moving in to take control and avenge herself for Titus's sacrifice of her eldest son — a mere trifle one would have thought compared with the scale of Titus's own loss of progeny.
It's of course a weakness in the play that the extravagance of the blood-lettings is out of proportion to the motives for them, though it's also possible to read this as an over-emphatic early version of Shakespeare's perennial obsession with the disastrous consequences of power falling — you can hardly help saying — into the wrong hands, horribly symbolised as this is by the amputation of Titus's own left hand and of both hands of Lavinia. The villain behind these particular deeds is Tamara's lover, the black Aaron, Joe Dixon powerfully and even amusingly playing up to the character's credo of evil for evil's sake which is such an intriguing anticipation of Iago.
A wry humour does indeed run through the piece, and there's an unforgettable Lear-like moment, pivotal to the whole play, when Titus, urged to storm', for the first time starts to laugh. But what could so easily be otiose here helps to lighten and make real theatrical sense out of what might otherwise seem risibly melodramatic.
Bill Alexander's direction builds towards the wonderfully strange scene in which Tamora and her two surviving sons, masked as Revenge, Rape and Murder, visit the 'mad' Titus, only for him to turn the tables on them. In the horrendous banquet that follows we're confronted with a chillingly sacrilegious parody, at least the equal of that in Battlers Viridiana, of the Last Supper. And the strange thing is that it was impossible to laugh. No one could pretend that Titus is the Bard at his best. but Alexander stages the play as though it were, and almost makes you believe him.
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