I attended a production of Titus Andronicus Saturday evening, at "Shakespeare's Globe Theatre" - that is to say, the hyper-real simulacrum of the original, dreamed into being by visionary American Sam Wanamaker and built in the late 90s. This had me fooled.The reconstruction, which is artistically and architecturally faithful, is (perhaps in a Disneyland way) exactly how one expects it to be. It was the first balmy night of the London summer, and the bank of the Thames was thronged with drunks and lovers. Sometimes these were the same people.
Have I ever had a better time at a Shakespeare play? Maybe once, when I was fourteen, in Ontario, or so, when Brian Bedford played a brilliant Richard II. But I doubt it. The bawdy, ultra-violent production, directed by Lucy Bailey, takes full advantage of the groundlings as a crowd to swell a scene. Also, the use of carts, as used in medieval mystery plays, pulling the players through the audience, in the round, to declaim and sport there, was thrilling and doubled the visceral sense of the play's havoc unleashed.
Much has been made of the story - which is deeply resonant of the present moment in Iraq (and elsewhere) - a cycle of barbaric militarism-turned-sadism that becomes a spiral of very cruel bloodshed. In brief, Titus is a great General and a good Roman (a Colin Powell type) who obeys the law to the letter, and beyond, into blinding nobility. This means that, upon his return to Rome, having vanquished the Goths, he sacrifices one of his prisoners (Queen of the Goths Tamora's son) as is the rule of law, to Roman gods, despite her pleas for leniency - this sets off a chain of madness.
Next, within minutes Titus declines the crowds' demand that he become Emperor, and supports the lawful transition to the callow, debauched Saturninus, the late Emperor's eldest son. Saturninus, newly-laurelled, now declares his intention to take Titus' daughter Lavinia to be his wife, even though she is betrothed to his brother, Bassianus. This near-Oedipal rapine signals worse to come. Titus' sons defend Bassianus' claim to their sister (which is based on true love) and seek to kidnap her away from the bad Emperor. Titus defends the claims of the young Emperor, and kills one of his sons in trying to rescue back his daughter.
Startlingly, the unfair Emperor does not appreciate this noble sacrifice, but rather blames Titus for his son's actions - and cancels his marriage offer to Lavinia, instead marrying - on the spot - the sexually charismatic Tamora, hacking away her chains. Tamora's and Titus' shocking reversal of fortune is now complete - the slave is Empress of Rome, and the beloved General is an outcast, doomed to be destroyed by Tamora who remembers the murder of her son and vows revenge. All of this takes place in the first ten minutes, so you see how action-packed the play is.
The tragedy is that both Titus and Tamora are locked in to a belief in vengeance. However, as the play proceeds, Titus, much like Job, or Lear, is brought to suffer levels of horror and ordeals of such sadism and loss, that he must either go mad and lose faith in divinity, or have his faith strengthened. This being Shakespeare, not King James, Titus goes mad.
A short deviation is in order here. The acts of violence in this play re worthy of a "video nasty" - it makes something from a chainsaw massacre look tame - and indeed about ten people fainted the night I was there - old and young, man and woman - and Tamora's sons have something of Deliverance about them. Terribly, Lavinia has a surgically-enforced aphasia thrust upon her, as she is faced with an unbearable mimesis - becoming the "real" to classical "Philomel".
Philomel was raped, had her tongue cut away, and hands cut off. So too, with Lavinia. The scene where she and her young husband are cornered, trapped, and then realize what will happen to them is - to say the least - deeply disturbing, The way that Bailey directs this transgressive sequence of extreme sexual mutilation gives full weight to the suffering impact of all victims of torture and rape in wartime.
Back to Titus. He is played beautifully by Douglas Hodge. I think that Hodge is the best actor I have now ever seen on stage, and that includes Ralph Fiennes and Kevin Spacey. I had enjoyed his dashing turn in the BBC-TV adaptation of Middlemarch, but nothing prepared me for this. He was electric, galvanized, tormented, funny, and always-moving, just compelling to watch.
Hodge entirely enacts the post-traumatic eloquence of utter despair. Mirroring his muted Lavinia, who is forced to retain only an inner voice, Hodge, who begins as a stalwart Roman, evolves into a fully deranged, yet never less than also fully conscious, witty, humane expressiveness - he becomes the tongue his daughter has lost. He cackles, jests, debates, and ultimately concludes that justice has fled the earth. Having given his hand, and received two lopped heads - his deeply-sensitive and loving blood ransom repaid with total humiliating indifference - Titus confronts the unspeakable, and determines to throw language above the world, to the next. In this world, he will use action again.
Knowing his talking can do nothing, he shoots arrows to the lost gods, begging for mercy or justice. The arrows become rain somewhere, but otherwise fall on deaf ears. There being no justice, Titus/ Hodge goes medieval on Tamora's sons, and the end of the play descends into Death Wish bathos - but always grippingly. You can understand, if not condone, to paraphrase Cherie Blair.
Titus Andronicus is often considered a lesser, savage play. It is violent, but it is violence bodily entangled with language, blood and flesh - it is the play that most demands we note the way the tongue, and the polis, are connected. This poesis / polis connection makes the play a subtextual working through of Platonic and Aristotelian notions of poetics, and politics. Shakespeare clearly fused the two worlds.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5042516.stm
[ps comment on A's note - I saw Lester as Hamlet; Spacey in many productions (he's a genius I think) and still say Hodge was superb. I found nothing wrong with his diction. As for indicating that I live in "London, England" - perhaps my worthy interlocutor is geographically-impaired - but it is common courtesy to do so, lest those who live in "London, Canada" - and other such, smaller Londons, feel neglected.]
Comments
I am bemused, however, by your fulsome praise of Douglas Hodge: "The best actor I have now ever seen on stage."
You should get about more, Mr Swift. Presumably you missed Spacey as Richard II and his mesmerising performance in National Anthems. Presumably you missed Adrian Lester's astonishing Hamlet and, further back, Antony Sher's Macbeth, Paul Scofield's Othello ... I could go on.
Of course, Tarantino-style special effects might make good theatre, but not necessarily good Shakespeare. It all goes back to what the Bard, through Hamlet, had to say about acting: "... by use all gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings ..."
Yes, indeed, as a groundling, my ears were split at times by the rantings and bellowings of Mr Hodge, which thereby occasionally became incomprehensible. Diction is king. If you can't understand an actor's Shakespearean words, then, I suggest, that is not good acting.
Incidentally, Mr Swift, thanks for confirming for us, in the introduction to your blog, that London is in England.