Gore blimey... the stage is awash with bloody carnage
Aquick Sunday confession. Quite often when someone asks what I’ve seen, and what I’d recommend, I go completely blank. Mercifully, I’m not alone in this – other critics will admit to a similar amnesia. It’s one of the hazards of the job. You’re so focused on the next big review that what has just been appraised can be swiftly forgotten.
This week, though, I don’t think I’d spend much time racking my brain. What have I seen? Well, aside from the great Sir Ian McKellen treating audiences in north London to a superb new solo show about his life and theatrical times, I’ve witnessed (you may want to come back to this article if you’re eating your breakfast) a man digging his fingers into a pie to produce an encrusted head, a woman tottering in tongue-less disorientation, caked in blood, her arms ending in crimson stumps, and a freshly severed hand quivering on a plate.
Oh yes – and I’ve also beheld gore saturating the uniform of a nurse stabbed to death to prevent her telling all about a newborn baby (a case of Kill the Midwife), plus two men strung upside down, a knife then coolly swiped across their throats so that blood trickles down their faces into a waiting basin. Ugh!
In short, I’ve seen Titus Andronicus, starring David Troughton, at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s early shocker given the full 18-certificate treatment.
Not for director Blanche McIntyre the genteel visual euphemism for blood of trailing bands of ribbon. No, instead she has gone for the “sit-upand-watch” horror of visceral carnage. Or perhaps that should be “sit up, get up, walk out”. At every performance prior to opening night, someone either fainted, vomited, or dashed for the exit. I didn’t – couldn’t, naturally – leave, but I can’t remember a production recently that has left me more open-mouthed in disgust and fascination.
That’s the great thing about theatre, of course: the audience are captive and imaginatively immersed in ways which the cinema – for all its advantages in grisly verisimilitude – can’t match. You’re in the same space as the horrible events: you can “smell” the fear, scent the malevolent delight – in the case of the Old Vic’s recent
King Lear, you could even find yourself ducking as one of blinded Gloucester’s eyeballs got lobbed into the audience by Jane Horrocks’ Regan.
The RSC has been unleashing buckets of blood this year, thanks to their Rome season, with a particularly impressive, authentic-looking assassination scene in Julius Caesar and the decapitation of John the Baptist in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, with Matthew Tennyson’s gender-switched temptress kissing a horribly lifelike, dripping head. The river Avon you might say is experiencing a crimson tide – but it’s true elsewhere: Salome at the National, Julius Caesar pretty much everywhere. We’re in an age of gore – small wonder, given that extremist violence is so omnipresent, and biblical and medieval barbarities so the stuff of nightly news.
Shakespeare himself may well have been indirectly “inspired” by the more gruesome acts of religious intolerance in the turbulent century of his birth – the hideous, inhumane persecution and slaughter of Protestants under Mary, as recorded in Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs (1563). And the treatment of the poor of his time in general is enough to make you blanch. As the academic Francis Barker notes in a book of essays The Culture of Violence, the barbarity of Shakespeare’s Romans diverts our gaze from the Elizabethan state’s slaughter of “men, women and children… strung up on gallows by a hempen noose. Sometimes the spinal cord was snapped at once; or they hung by their necks … until their brains died of hypoxaemia, or until the shock killed them”. Nasty.
We tend to reach out for the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Shakespeare above all, to confront (and thereby perhaps allay) fears of unfathomable atrocity.
With the Greeks, it’s a different story: even though modern directors don’t flinch from elaborating the carnage those tragedies contain, the terrible events their characters suffer are, in the main, described; they happen offstage. We do still enact, from time to time, town to town, medieval mystery play cycles – which provided the first theatrical tributary of gore: animal blood dripping from the whips and crowns of thorns, dummies filled with blood assisting simulations of disembowelling.
Aside from the shockwaves of the so-called Nineties in-yer-face generation, whose unofficial figurehead was Sarah Kane, we’ve been rather gore-starved in the past 20 years. That may be changing, on both sides of the Atlantic. Much press coverage has alighted on the Broadway opening of Headlong’s raved-about production of Orwell’s 1984 – directed by wunderkind Robert Icke. “Attendees have fainted, thrown up and screamed at the actors from their seats,” noted The Hollywood Reporter, adding: “At one performance, some audience members were so on edge that they immediately got into a heightened argument. Cops were called.”
The scene that’s causing the distress is the unstinting depiction of Winston Smith’s torture at the hands of the sinister O’Brien in the Ministry of Love. Funnily enough, I staged my own version of that scene in a modest celebration of Orwell in 2009 at Trafalgar Studios; at one point the actor Alan Cox pretended to rip a tooth out of Smith’s mouth, using a niftily concealed Polo mint, hurling it dramatically across the floor. It never failed to get a collective gasp, but we never had any “fainters”. To this day, I feel I let those folks down.