Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (23 page)

How did you approach the characterization of Titus himself? What kind of figure was he to you and to the actors who played him?

GD:
Antony Sher was returning to South Africa for the first time in his professional career, and so speaking the very first lines of Titus was a very emotional moment for him:

He based quite a lot of his performance on his father. He used a South African accent, a sort of Boer accent. Actually he was likened to Eugene Terreblanche, which was not really exactly what we were looking for. He was an old Afrikaner who believed in the status quo. This in my opinion is Titus’ fatal flaw. Even though Saturninus, as the emperor’s elder son, has the right to rule, he is palpably psychotic and neurotic. Yet when it falls to Titus to choose who should be the next ruler he goes entirely by the status quo. He thereby brings upon himself, his family, and his country terrible devastation. One of the first things that Saturninus does is marry the Queen of the Goths, whom Titus has just brought back in chains after ten years of war, and Titus still doesn’t get the point that he’s unleashed terrible forces upon the land. We did some judicial cutting of the script. Almost within moments of arriving on the stage Titus has killed his son and the danger is that he seems a lunatic from the word go; he doesn’t go mad, he seems mad from the start. We cut the death of Mutius, which I suspect was a later addition, because there’s a very weird segue back into the text which really doesn’t work: when his brother Marcus says “step out of these sudden dumps.” You just think, “that’s a very bad segue.” There was a cut there. It helped not to have the death of Mutius so early in order that Titus seems rational.

7.
Gregory Doran’s 1995 production for the National Theatre and Market Theatre of Johannesburg with Antony Sher as Titus: “Tony was in his mid-forties when he played the role but he played him as an old man. The advanced age of Titus was a great help, because he’s one step behind everybody else.”

Tony was in his mid-forties when he played the role but he played him as an old man. The advanced age of Titus was a great help, because he’s one step behind everybody else. In that astonishing roller-coaster first act, where everything in the world happens, Titus is constantly one step behind and clinging on to what he knows, which is the status quo. That is ultimately his fatal flaw. And I think that’s what Tony brought out in the part.

YN:
When I direct plays I try my best not to have to answer such questions as this. You should find the answer yourself when you see the production. To answer by using words is not sufficient. What I as a director ask for and the eventual production results will not necessarily be in accord with each other.

What’s the place of women in the play? How do you see the characters of Tamora and Lavinia? Are they powerfully opposed or do you see connections between them?

GD:
To some extent opposed. Lavinia is a bit of a princess, I don’t think she’s such a sweetheart. The way she laughs at Tamora and regards her as a sort of subspecies is a very unattractive quality and certainly that was brought out in a postapartheid production in South Africa, where there are very defined social gradations and separations between the different strata of society. Dorothy Ann Gould who played Tamora rooted her part in the moment right at the beginning when she sees her son Alarbus sacrificed by Titus. The Goths had dog tags around their necks and she kept her son’s dog tag so that she could constantly bear witness. The reason she was doing what she was doing was not because of being defeated after ten years of war but to get back at Titus and his family for the humiliation that her son and her family was put through. She rooted her as a woman
who is driven to violence, which quickly topples over into excess, from a very real standpoint of grief over her children. In the moment when she tells her sons to rape Lavinia, and then Lavinia appeals to her, you do see this in the context of Lavinia having been incredibly rude and vicious to Tamora. I’m not saying Lavinia gets what she deserves because I hardly think that’s the case. She tries to appeal to Tamora as another woman but Tamora by that time has been too degraded and humiliated by the violence she has experienced.

YN:
This is a question I choose not to answer.

The appearance of Lavinia onstage after Chiron and Demetrius have raped and mutilated her has famously had people fainting in the aisles even when the violence has been presented in a very stylized manner (Peter Brook’s use of red ribbons for blood, for example). Why do you think this moment is so devastating for audiences and what were your experiences of it?

GD:
Somebody in our audience projectile vomited over the four rows in front! It is a devastating appearance. I think that one of the most difficult speeches in Shakespeare is Marcus Andronicus’ discovery of Lavinia. One of the musicians in our production described it as like that dull zoom in
Jaws
when Roy Scheider suddenly realizes that his kid is in the lagoon and so is the shark. The camera zooms in on Scheider and the background is zoomed out at the same time. It’s an intensification, it’s like the world stops, it’s like time freezes. Jennifer Woodburne, who played Lavinia, had done some very specific groundwork and had been to see a man who had had his hands chopped off in a violent episode and a man who as a result of cancer had no tongue. She looked at how these people coped and one of the things she discovered was that if you don’t have any tongue you have a huge buildup of saliva in your mouth. We had presented Lavinia as a Grace Kelly–style princess and one of the humiliating things was that suddenly she was dribbling. There was a sense of her father’s tenderness toward her mopping up her dribble, but also she is possibly pregnant as a result of the rape and she has this terrible severing of her limbs. Jenny discovered that victims of this type were hypersensitive about being touched. Her presentation of Lavinia was so devastating in its “reality” that it was amazingly moving to watch. The tenderness between her and her father was heightened by his protectiveness toward her. Then when he chops off his own hand there is a moment of very black comedy when he says “Thy niece and I, poor creatures, want our hands / And cannot passionate our tenfold grief / With folded arms.” It was very potent.

8.
Yukio Ninagawa’s production, which visited Stratford as part of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival in 2006: “I used red ribbon as blood … It is an image that came from inside my body.” Hitomi Manaka as Lavinia.

YN:
I used red ribbon as blood—similarly in my original production of
Medea
twenty-five years ago. It is an image that came from inside my body. I have heard that Peter Brook once used the same device, but for me I just hate liquid blood.

Hamlet
is usually thought of as the greatest revenge drama, but
Titus Andronicus
is much more direct in the way it dramatizes revenge. Do you think it’s too much neglected in that respect, and, if so, why do you think that may be?

GD:
I saw Deborah Warner’s production in 1987 and it felt as though she was really taking it seriously, as Peter Brook had taken it
seriously in 1955.
Titus
was the last of Shakespeare’s plays to be done at Stratford; it took until 1955. Its depiction of violence is so real and graphic that it is an uncomfortable play to look in the face. It’s an easy play to ridicule, an easy play to send up, an easy play to dismiss as being just Chamber of Horrors, but I think its depiction of a society in meltdown is very vivid. The years of appalling violence that South Africa had been through made you honor that violence and I think the play speaks now to the modern world in a way that perhaps it didn’t speak before. We found echoes of Beckett. Beckett couldn’t have written
Waiting for Godot
if we hadn’t had two world wars and atomic bombs. Suddenly the world made no sense anymore. In
Titus
it’s a world which no longer makes sense. There are no strict moral borders. Titus is surnamed “Pius”: piety toward the state, religion, and family, a Roman sense of piety. What Titus knew as a world of order was collapsing around him. When the Goths got in the chaos would follow. I think white South Africa to a large degree clung onto its order because it feared chaos. That’s what we were able to explore through the play. It’s very easy to dismiss it as an early play. I think it’s a great play.

YN:
Any play pales when compared with
Hamlet
, including
Titus Andronicus
. I have directed
Hamlet
seven times already and I am still trying to get it right.

The final scene involving the pie is one of the most striking in the whole canon. What was your approach to that scene? How did you try to negotiate the balance between morbid humor and poignant tragedy?

GD:
It’s all about how Titus plays it. He is in control of that scene. He’s the MC, the host at this grisly party. We want Saturninus to get his comeuppance and Lavinia to be revenged. We’ve fallen out of love with Tamora as a result of her revenge plot, so we’re quite glad when she gets what’s coming. The boys we’ve come to hate because of their rape of Lavinia, so we’re quite happy to see them baked in the pie in the new rules of this society. There is a grisly black humor to it but it’s a very satisfactory and very enjoyable humor. Then there’s a rawer, blacker element to the play when we have to deal with Aaron
at the end. That feels as though the society hasn’t learned the lessons and has degraded Aaron so badly that the cycle of violence can only continue. That makes it a prophetic play as well.

YN:
It was my aim to address the pathological aspects of the humor and the severity of this tragedy at the same time. I was looking for some kind of salvation, or at least the suggestion of it. In spite of the tragedy that unfolds in this play, I was eagerly searching for a fragment of hope. That is all. I think I have said too much, so I bid you farewell.

AUTHORSHIP:
Long considered to be an incomplete Shakespearean work,
Timon of Athens
has been shown by modern scholarship to be, in all probability, a collaboration between Shakespeare and
THOMAS MIDDLETON
, with the following likely distribution of scenes:

MAJOR PARTS:
(
with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage
) Timon (34%/210/8), Apemantus (10%/100/4), Flavius (8%/41/6), Alcibiades (7%/39/5), Poet (4%/30/2), First Senator (4%/27/4), Painter (3%/30/2), Second Senator (3%/14/4), Lucilius (2%/13/2).

LINGUISTIC MEDIUM:
75% verse, 25% prose.

DATE:
1604–06? No firm evidence for date, but stylistic similarity suggests proximity to
King Lear
and Middleton’s
A Trick to Catch the
Old One
(1605); this was the period when Middleton was writing for the King’s Men, so is likeliest for a collaboration. The shared source with
Antony and Cleopatra
(see below) supports such a date. The masque and the concern with flatterers are more Jacobean than Elizabethan (i.e. after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603); the absence of a clear five-act structure implies composition before the King’s Men began playing the indoor Blackfriars theater (i.e. before 1608).