Gore blimey! Titus is not for faint-hearts
TITUS Andronicus, the Bard’s bloodiest play, is so mad in its violence you wonder if he was trying to out-gore Christopher Marlowe.
When they staged it at the open-air Globe a couple of years ago, medical orderlies had to keep taking away spectators who had fainted.
It opens with a human sacrifice (by General Andronicus, heedless of mercy) and from that moment numerous other massacres flow: sons felled and decapitated like saplings; a young woman raped, her tongue cut out and hands amputated; Andronicus himself having a hand sawn off by a couple of surgical nurses (horribly believable here); a mother being fed pasties made from her sons’ pulverised skulls.
There is even the killing of a fly. ‘Titus’ is an unrelenting snuff show, and tricky to stage.
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s new, modern- dress version uses buckets of Kensington gore. The laundry bill for this production must be horrendous.
Ancient Rome’s senate has been given a modern- architecture revamp and is protected by an electronic metal fence.
The show starts with an overlong, badlydanced sequence in which hoodie- clad protestors are chased hither and thither by riot police.
Director Blanche McIntyre, in her leaden way, is suggesting that today’s political uncertainties are mirrored in Shakespeare’s play. A less didactic director would let us work that out for ourselves.
David Troughton is good as Andronicus, the ageing military man too naive for politics. He carries the production with the show’s other senior professional, Patrick Drury, playing Titus’s brother.
Mr Drury, particularly in a scene when he wears a bow tie, resembles that other reassuring presence, TV’s Denis Norden.
Director McIntyre frequently overdoes things — too many selfies are taken (this has now become a cliche) and the on-stage TV crew is a distraction. From Martin Hutson, playing wicked Emperor Saturninus, and others we have a surfeit of shouting.
Some of the younger players lack the stage seriousness we once expected from Stratford. Nia Gwynne is miscast as the Gothic empress Tamora, who surely needs to be more un Roman, more exotic, more sensual, more of a minx.
Yet the story rattles along and it reaches a good climax before the interval when Titus, cruelly abused, vows revenge on Tamora and Saturninus. ‘We have much to do,’ he growls.
The second half slumps — a mad scene making tiresome use of a giant cardboard box and Miss Gwynne losing the last connection with Tamora’s character.
There is some ill-judged breaking of the fourth wall with actors asking members of the audience to help them. This led to titters from teens. Does this bring in younger audiences? Two twentysomethings in my row kept looking at their mobiles. They did not return after the interval. I have never seen a Stratford theatre so un-full.
The three hours and ten minutes passed quite quickly. And the play, though implausibly cruel, has its own, ghastly impetus and may remind us of the redeeming qualities of the humdrum in life.