Although Jacobean tragedy is generally regarded as a shift toward melodrama and lurid excess, Shakespeare, influenced by Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, early in this Elizabethan drama topped them all. We see such outrageous onstage violence as rape, cutting off the hero's hand, bringing on two of the hero's sons' chopped-off heads, and his daughter appearing raped and bleeding from having her hands and tongue cut off. Shakespeare didn't really write stage directions, but one of my favorites appears in the First Folio edition of Titus Andronicus: "Enter Lavinia, ravished." Friends used to try to imagine just how the actress might play that direction.
Add the considerable amount of raunchy humor in the dialogue, and you might understand why I have trouble taking this tragedy seriously. It's from young, enthusiastic Shakespeare, though, so it's full of poetic exuberance, and is sporadically moving or entertaining -- sometimes both. Indeed, I have seen truly great actors manage to make the preposterously piled-up sufferings of Titus tragic and affecting, partly by underplaying his own unmitigated willfulness and cruel egomania. But it's easier to enjoy this play as a comic book with benefits. Director and designer Darko Tresnjak has devised a sumptuous, stunning looking production built around impressive oratory and actually believable, gleefully mean-spirited villainy, complete with noble posturing and notable lecherous molestations. Also statues and actors providing nearly nude muscular bodies, acrobatic fighting, matings and fightings, and a whole lot of blood. We start with two brothers nastily competing to be emperor and Titus' refusal of the title, which neither beneficiary actually appreciates. For spectacle, we get Titus' triumphal procession with his defeated victims virtually naked in a cage where Queen Tamora begs for mercy and Titus has her eldest son stabbed to death pressed against his mother. So the winners are garbed in togas and have gold chains and wristwatches, and the losers are caged and covered in blood. But treachery is soon afoot, also on the teats, and atop the back of the heads. Titus' daughter is engaged to the wrong competing brother, so the one picked as Emperor takes caged Queen Tamora as Empress instead, and Titus gets mad at a son who doesn't want his brother to be killed, so he kills his son to keep his pride up -- do these sound like people you want to cheer for? I didn't think the whole rigmarole of cooking up the evil Empress's sons into pastries that she gets to eat has any surprises, but Brendan Murray and Bruce Godfree play them with such glee and energetic, yet gender- ambivalent sexuality that they mix welcome comedy with their villainy. John Vickery is an expressive Titus who speaks his lines with clarity and dignity, always noble and believable, but I couldn't become moved by him. Claire Lautier is variously persuasive as a victim and scary as an opponent, but always glamorous and commanding as Tamora. Skye Brandon makes the victimized Bassianus likable and sympathetic, and Sean Arbuckle's preening Emperor is foolish enough to win a little sympathy for an entirely unlikable character. Amanda Lisman manages to keep a large part of Lavinia's impossible role actually realistic and sympathetic. The huge cast of nobles, warriors, priests, priestesses, whores, tribunes, clowns, and scary Goths play with passion and straight faces. And in the scene-chewing role of Aaron, Zamora's lover, which only Julie Taymor's film got right before this, Dion Johnstone seems to be an entirely commanding figure from another play -- somehow superior to his role and surroundings. So it's still noble Titus' posturing Cut-folks'-body-parts-off and Eat-your-children-for-killing-my-family-members-that-I-didn't-kill-myself show; but director/designer Darko Tresnjak, with the help of Stratford's nifty production values and masterful cast, has made an often elevated and entirely entertaining theatrework of it. I'm not saying it makes complete sense, but . ..
