Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (22 page)

On playing Titus, Brian Cox commented:

When the soul goes beyond tears it seems that the only rational response is laughter and this is key to the play. As Alan Dessen points out: “in Titus, laughter (when under control) can mix with tragic effects; and that, given the right conditions, the ‘unplayable’ can become the theatrically potent.”
⁶⁷

6.
RSC 2003, directed by Bill Alexander. 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. Marcus Andronicus (Ian Gelder) looks on over Titus (David Bradley) and Lavinia (Eve Myles).

It is little wonder in a century where nihilism and the absurd have been key artistic and philosophical responses to unspeakable horrors of the world that
Titus
has re-found its place as one of Shakespeare’s most relevant and prescient works.

Gregory Doran
, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor before becoming associate director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as associate and subsequently chief associate director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays and the revival of works by his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries. He discusses here his 1995 production of
Titus Andronicus
for the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, in conjunction with the National Theatre Studio, with Antony Sher as Titus; the production later transferred to the Cottesloe Theatre. Sher and Doran have written about the experience of putting on the production in
Woza Shakespeare
! (1996).

Yukio Ninagawa
has been working in the theater in Japan since 1955, when he joined the Seihai company as an actor. In 1967 he formed his own company, Gendaijin-Gekijo, or “modern people’s theater.” After their disbandment in 1971 he formed Sakura-sha (“cherry blossom company”), which disbanded in 1974. That same year, however, Ninagawa directed his first major production—
Romeo and Juliet
—in a large theater, which proved to be his breakthrough. Since then he has directed many Japanese-language productions of Shakespeare, including
Hamlet
(seven times),
King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, Pericles
, and
Coriolanus
, to name a very modest portion of his prolific output. Because of their incessant touring, Ninagawa’s company has garnered a strong reputation and fan base across
Europe and North America. He has directed many productions of ancient Greek plays, while also being known in Japan as the most modern of directors, always trying to reflect contemporary concerns in his work. He was invited to bring his production of
Titus Andronicus
to Stratford in 2006, as part of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, where it was received with universal acclaim.

Many critics have dismissed
Titus Andronicus
as a youthful effort, and some have even gone as far as to deny Shakespeare’s authorship of it. What’s your view of the play? Do you think it deserves to be viewed in this way?

GD:
I had a very particular experience of
Titus Andronicus
. I directed it with Antony Sher as Titus at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg just after the ending of apartheid in South Africa. In the country that had invented “necklacing,” which was putting a rubber tire around someone’s neck and setting it alight, we discovered that the daily experience of violence was such that it made the horrors of
Titus Andronicus
seem virtually everyday. We did a group session with the company, who were all South African, to ask them about their individual experiences of violence and found those experiences to be so specific and horrific that the violence was a reality to them. Therefore the play turned from being a play which is glutted with extraordinary, excess Grand Guignol violence into a play that dealt with how people deal with violence. It became much more specifically about the need to break the cycles of violence. When Marcus Andronicus speaks at the end of bringing “This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf,” it’s about how violence escalates and how cycles of revenge can destroy a country. South Africa emerging from apartheid had a very real experience of that. So the play didn’t seem like a gratuitous horror story, it turned into a play that dealt in a very humane and powerful way with how people are degraded by violence and how it can also bring out great humanity in people.

YN:
I am intrigued by this play. Whether the script was written by Shakespeare or not does not bother me.
Titus Andronicus
strips humanity bare. It confirms that the folly of the world in which we live
has always been thus, both before and after the age in which the author lived. It is the real world and I am ashamed of it.

What’s your take on the extraordinary violence in the play? What kind of dynamics do you think it has in performance and what were the challenges involved in staging it?

GD:
We didn’t have a single drop of blood in our production; we suggested the violence. For example, when Titus, in probably Aaron’s worst piece of villainy, sends his severed hand to redeem, as he thinks, his two sons from prison, we put their heads in a black plastic bag—this was basically a modern-dress production—and he wrapped his hand in a black plastic bag too. It stressed the disposability of people’s limbs and the trade in human parts that the play indulges in, but it also suggested the violence rather than illustrating it in a way that made it Hammer House of Horror. Sometimes we displaced the violence. For the rape of Lavinia, which must be one of the most violent scenes in all literature, Chiron and Demetrius perpetrated that violent act upon a mannequin, while Lavinia herself became distracted and danced around them while they stabbed this mannequin in all sorts of violent and horrible ways. The attempt was to present the violence but not to wallow in it or indulge a sense of voyeurism. There is a lot of violence to deal with and we took quite a long time to work out, to use a phrase which came from the group discussions, how to honor the violence. That became an important element of the production.

YN:
I am exercised by the total lack of imagination of the characters in the play, the foolhardiness of people who do not understand the world or those who live in it except where they are fulfilled by their own experience. It makes them brutal and that is today’s world. I long to create a stage that is free from bloodshed. We are seeing too many corpses and bloodletting in the media. It makes us immune to the true horror of it. My challenge was to see if I could find a different reality.

Many audiences react to moments of the play with laughter (possibly nervous, possibly derisory), and critics have argued for this
as a sign of its failure. Do you think this might actually be deliberate? Is it to some extent a black comedy?

GD:
I think there certainly are elements of black comedy. We had a very strange, extraordinary experience of the play when one night we had the Anglican Church Society of Soweto, an entirely black audience, watching the production. Aaron was played by a soap star from TV, Sello Maake ka Ncube. When Sello came onstage the audience went with him. They saw the play from Aaron’s point of view. They actually laughed along with Aaron through the gulling of the two boys, even through the rape of Lavinia, right through until he came to tell Titus to chop his hand off, when Aaron turns to the audience and says “Let fools do good and fair men call for grace. / Aaron will have his soul black like his face.” And the audience booed him. So it went from laughing along with him to a sense of being uncomfortable with the violence he was committing and then an outright rejection of him. Then, when the Nurse brings the baby that Aaron has had with Tamora, that Tamora has had smuggled out of the palace and sent back to Aaron to dispatch, we discovered that the audience were wooed back to Aaron. It was a very live audience in terms of interacting with the play. It was a very interesting creation of the role because what Sello did as Aaron the Moor was to bring onto the stage with him a sense of forty years of oppression under apartheid, so you saw Aaron not simply as a stage villain but as a man deeply wronged, through generations of his family, and somehow he was going to kick back and this was payback time. That made his violence all the more horrible but not infinitely understandable, so that even the black audience on that night would not go all the way with him.

I think the laughter in the last scene is entirely intentional. Shakespeare has written the rhythm of the lines as a deliberate cataract of rhymes, line upon line, ending with a climax, when Titus says “Why, there they are both, bakèd in that pie.” It’s a great climax and an absolutely guaranteed laugh. The penultimate line doesn’t work, alas, in modern pronunciation—it ends “presently”—so for once in Shakespeare I allowed myself to change the line so that the penultimate line ended “bring them nigh.” The rhymes are a deliberate flagging
up by Shakespeare of the absurdity and the black comedy of that final scene as Titus serves Tamora her sons baked into a pie (which was a good prop to do every night!).

YN:
Laughter as a reaction to this play does not necessarily argue a sign of its failure. To be a fully rounded person you need to laugh and black humor is all part of that. Those who do not laugh are not complete people. In the world that we live in it is right and proper that we should laugh.

What kind of Rome do you see the play presenting? The plot’s fictitious, unlike Shakespeare’s other Roman plays; did this play a part in your production design?

GD:
Ancient Rome is clearly a metaphor. Shakespeare is not talking specifically about a particular society. The advantage of the metaphor is that it can be applied to any society. The play starts with a fiercely contested election in a country that is not expecting elections, because the people expect Saturninus, the elder son of the emperor, to rule next anyway. We were doing the play in the post-election period in South Africa, an election in which a massive proportion of the population had voted for the first time. They understood the nature of a highly charged election and therefore the Roman metaphor was interesting to apply to South Africa. Being able to reapply the metaphor to South Africa was very useful, because we could say that here is something that is very resonant in this country now, and yet here is something that is not necessarily applicable to this society. It is a Rome that has been through war, Titus has come back from ten years fighting the Goths, and it is a racist society. All those things had a particular application to South Africa.

YN:
For me, whose working life has been spent in Asia, the Rome of this play resembled a photograph taken in the ruins of Nagasaki after the atomic bomb dropped. Still standing is a stone gateway at the entrance to a Shinto Shrine and elsewhere a stone has broken the neck of the statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus. For me this photograph connected with the Rome we find in this play. My
Titus Andronicus
is a kitsch, blasted white city based on that image.

What’s your view of the characterization of Aaron? Is he simply a “black dog,” or are there more complexities behind the depictions of his race and his personal motivations?

YN:
There is a universality in the character of Aaron, which we ignore at our peril. Such a person is not restricted solely to the life of this play alone. He can be found everywhere. He is very real to anyone who has been subjected to such repression.