RSC’S Titus
The goriest production in a generation
Titus Andronicus Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-avon
At every preview performance of Blanche Mcintyre’s revival of Titus
Andronicus, there has either been “a vomiting, a fainting or a leaving”, the RSC’S head of press cheerily advised me as I headed in to watch the latest instalment of its Rome season.
Yeah, right, I thought. That’s just a PR ruse to try to put it on a par with the Globe’s headline-grabbing account of Shakespeare’s goriest play in 2014, which achieved a fainting/exiting count of more than 100 punters.
But sure enough, come the third act, and the prospect of David Troughton’s general Titus losing a hand in order to secure (in vain, as it transpires) two of his sons’ lives, and there was a notable rustling in the stalls. Exit, accompanied by a concerned friend, a rather distressedlooking woman.
A wise move, I think. Even more than the sight of decapitations and the offstage defilement of Titus’s daughter Lavinia (Hannah Morrish), who emerges from her rape by Demetrius and Chiron (vile sons of Tamora, Goth captive-turned-empress) without a tongue, her arms trailing bloody stumps, Titus’s mutilation wins the palm for inducing a head-to-toe shiver of revulsion. Here his lopped-off left hand sits, almost as if still twitching, in a silver dish, admired by Stefan Adegbola’s insanely beatific ‘‘Moor’’ Aaron, the villain.
In terms of technical accomplishment and visceral impact, there’s no faulting Mcintyre’s feast of horrors – albeit the darkly comic climactic banquet itself, in which the avenging Andronicus serves the cruel emperor Saturninus and Tamora a pie made from the latter’s sons, feels oddly rushed (as does the final death-splurge that brings the body count to 14). The pièce de résistance, for me, is the moment when those hated Goths are hung upside-down, their throats then coolly slit by pater Andronicus, his mute daughter collecting the dripping blood in a bowl. Overall, the hewing, hacking, stabbing, and shooting is world-class. In other respects, though, this long evening is a bit of a dog’s dinner. There’s fantastic work, throughout, from Troughton, grizzled, grey-faced, buttoned-up and stifflimbed – a loyal old warrior surviving battles abroad only to be betrayed at home, driven to clarifying madness by his blind adherence to a heartless state. He captures perfectly Titus’s rasping, ramrod arrogance, his crumpling up with agony, and the particular macabre pathos too of his wildly empathetic raving in defence of a slain fly: “How if that fly had a father and a mother?”
Yet the subtleties of his approach are encircled by gimmicky excesses, not least being forced to conduct a section of Act V from within a large cardboard box. Breaking (with designer Robert Innes Hopkins) from the season’s restrictive toga-themed format, Mcintyre pitches this as an urgent play for today. With wirefencing surrounding a glass-fronted imperial colonnade, Rome takes on the sheen of post-2008 Athens: there’s a dumb show involving police battling looting youths, much glib recourse to microphones, even an apparent wry nod to Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. It should bring the chaos home, but instead ramps up the sense of empty artifice.
As Saturninus, Martin Hutson reprises, to little avail, the neurotic intensity with which he shines, brightly, as Cassius in Julius Caesar while Nia Gwynne’s Tamora is surprisingly suburban. Slabs of the text get clobbered too by blunt verse-speaking. Granted, Titus is hardly Shakespeare’s finest hour but at times Troughton appears trapped in a slightly studenty production of an iffy play. Which isn’t quite as it should be.