Use of a chorus as a stage device also helped direct audience reaction with physical movements signaling appropriate responses to the action:
The chorus of servants played its part, squatting in ranks to each side of the stage before the pie was served ("Welcome, all," said Titus to the inhabitants of the pie, with a last touch of macabre humour), stretching forward in horror at the death of Lavinia, bending as Titus stabbed Tamora, gasping as Saturninus killed Titus, and finally rushing off through the audience as Lucius killed the Emperor.56
Warner's most outrageous touch of stage comedy was to use the soundtrack to Disney's Snow White. Brian Cox recalled:
it was decided that the company should whistle the tune ("Hi-Ho" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) as the banquet is prepared. It was a risk, but I believe one worth taking--once again for its contribution to the play's sense of the ludicrous. It was also unsettling, and at this point it is important to unsettle the audience, to create something from a different space, a different place, a different genre ... then, in full starched white chef's garb, I came in, leaping over the table, with the pie. The world had gone crazy; the audience's embarrassment about serving the boys in the pie was released in laughter ... The play has constantly walked the borderline between horror and laughter ... "Why, there they are, both baked in this pie; / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed" [5.3.60-61]. Sometimes that got a laugh, sometimes none at all. And then Tamora laughs in disbelief, and Titus laughs at her disbelief, and the audience is released to laugh again, only to be silenced by the terrible suddenness of the deaths. The real sensation of that was quite extraordinary, the visceral sense of it for the audience.57
Brian Cox as Titus became the central comic/tragic figure, blending "horror and burlesque ... [revealing] the play as a text about the abuses of power,"58 also "reminding the audience of the grim humorousness of the obscene."59
Warner used the black comedy inherent in the play, and highlighted rather than shied away from the comedy generated by the extreme moments of grotesque gore. In addition to this her addition of extra comic moments provided an emotional contrast to the horror of the play:
The ritual that ended the scene, including a flip of one head to Marcus and the giving of the hand to Lavinia (which she placed in her mouth and quickly enveloped with her stumps) did elicit some audience laughs, but, given the preparation in 1.1 and the long build in this scene, by this point shock, irony, and laughter were so intermingled that no "normal" reactions were possible. The effect was stunning.60
In 2003, director Bill Alexander was also aware of the importance of controlling the audience response to genuine and potentially unwanted moments of humor. With death after death in the final scene, he avoided laughter by altering the pace of the violence. David Bradley, who played Titus, explained:
[Alexander] wanted to invite laughter at certain times and then chop it. He wanted to be in control of the laughter and thought it would be rather sad if, having taken an audience through that whole story, the play ended in some kind of Gothic horror, Hammer House of Horror, or Tarantino-esque laughter. Sometimes during previews, the audience were laughing and we weren't sure if they were laughing at us or with us, for example during the three deaths at the end ... The audience are stunned and shocked into a gasp by the death of Lavinia, which is wonderfully exciting to hear and then they laugh at the pie, which is good. That's welcome laughter but then you want to stop it. So we found that if we ... had Lucius slowly walking over to a trapped Saturninus and stabbing him, there was total silence.61
Alexander's production didn't add to the humor inherent in the text with any extra characters or unscripted business. The mingling of tragedy with laughter in his production elicited compassion for the characters: "The staging is simple, somber, the acting measured, careful. A vast mask hovers over the proceedings, an archaic smile or smirk beneath its black, empty eyes. It's some god, relishing what might be a sneak preview of Lear."62 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. The effect was to emphasize the poignancy of recognizable people dealing with extremity: "even at the height of the carnage, after Titus has seen his daughter raped and two more sons killed, he can't resist bopping his brother over the head with his surviving hand."63 Reviewing the production, Paul Taylor pointed out the touching effectiveness of:
having the raped, mutilated and tongueless Lavinia (a piteous Eve Myles) reduced to kneeing her little nephew in the stomach in her impatience to find the book of Ovid that will help her explain by literary precedent the ordeal she has been through.64
David Bradley's Titus, after witnessing the destruction of his daughter and sons, breaks into strange, wild laughter that lies beyond tears. It's as if Shakespeare, the supreme poet, recognizes that words cannot cope with the ultimate absurdity of the human condition.65
On playing Titus, Brian Cox commented:
you need all your skills as an actor here to turn on a sixpence and change direction from the path you were on and take another, the path of gallows humour, of black, nihilistic humour, very twentieth-century in its mood--for in some ways this is the most modern of plays ... Titus becomes a richly potent figure of nihilism, of destruction, of revenge, who keeps searching, searching for a justice he will never find, for justice has been long dead for him.66
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.
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH GREGORY DORAN AND YUKIO NINAGAWA
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, baked 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 t
he 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.
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:
Hail, Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds!
Lo, as the bark that hath discharged his freight,
Returns with precious lading to the bay
From whence at first she weighed her anchorage,
Cometh Andronicus, bound with laurel boughs,
To resalute his country with his tears,
Tears of true joy for his return to Rome.
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.