family secret, all to do with herbs

Let me just say I was way ahead of the curve on Titus Andronicus: I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for it since I first started reading Shakespeare over 35 years ago, way before Julie Taymor and others made it fashionable to stage it, or at least to take it seriously. How could you not be interested in something frequently described as the worst play by the greatest playwright, or as so grotesque that someone besides sainted Shakespeare must have written it? In fact the play is tautly plotted and morally complex, and Titus in his madness and revenge prefigures such undoubted Shakespearean pinnacles as Hamlet and King Lear. He is a less titanic figure but still can stand on his own. So I was pretty thrilled to get a chance at last to see Titus Andronicus on stage, presented by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC, and directed by Gale Edwards, who had clearly seen the Taymor film but I thought improved on it in some ways.

The play is in fact grotesquely violent – the couple next to us seemed completely shell-shocked at intermission – but that shouldn't be a stumbling block at a time when Tarantino films open big at the box office, and Entertainment Weekly maintains a summer blockbuster body count. And it’s a useful corrective at a time when our country is casually dismembering and slaughtering its own soldiers and Iraqi citizens and then sweeping soldiers and citizens alike under the flag, as if Revenge, Rape, and Murder will not appear to us in their turn as they appear to Titus towards his end. Titus, like Lear, acts on a somewhat pigheaded sense of what his honor and authority demand, and right at the opening makes two fatal mistakes in a row: he kills the oldest son of captured Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and he gives the empire into the unstable hands of Saturninus, the older son of the last emperor, and our sympathy with Titus is always tempered by this knowledge. His daughter Lavinia is also not overly sympathetic; in fact, during her only extended scene of dialogue before Tamora’s sons rape and mutilate her, the one in which she taunts Tamora for adultery and for loving Aaron the Moor, she’s pretty much a bitch – if this were a certain type of Hollywood film about high school, you know exactly which wealthy stuck-up cheerleader she would be. Initially I had reservations about Sam Tsoutsouvas as Titus and Colleen Delany as Lavinia; he seemed too subdued and offhand, and she frankly just didn’t seem attractive enough to catch the supercilious eyes of Chiron and Demetrius, but as the play went on they won me over. I liked that this Titus was not a grand-stander, but someone who is used to having even muttered commands obeyed, and who is clearly thrown into shock by the unexpected but inevitable consequences of his actions in Rome. And Lavinia’s anguished suffering transformed the actress, so that by the final dinner-party she was serenely lovely, veiled and dressed in white with a red sash, looking like a Japanese bride, at the moment when her father, with all tenderness, swiftly snapped her neck to end her suffering and shame. I had tears pouring down my cheeks at the final scene, even though for me there’s no shock or suspense in what happens in Shakespeare. A lot of the credit must go to the music supplied by Martin Desjardins. For the scene after Lavinia’s rape and for the final scene he conjured up an elegantly melancholy understated adagio for strings (I assume he wrote it; I didn’t see anything to the contrary in the playbill) that framed the horrible violence in a heart-wrenching way.

As with Taymor’s film, the costumes are a combination of Roman, contemporary, and Italian fascist; Chiron and Demetrius are degenerate glam rockers (at one point filming themselves raping a woman on a couch shaped like giant red lips); the staging is primarily red, black, and white, with some touches of gold, as in Tamora’s costumes. Valerie Leonard as Tamora was more energetically evil than Jessica Lange in the film; she clearly is manipulating Saturninus from the start and is already involved with Aaron.

I give the production full credit for not shying away from the grotesque: Lavinia does exit, as instructed by her father and the stage directions, with Titus’s severed hand between her teeth, while Marcus and Titus carry the heads of his executed sons; she holds a basin in her stumps to catch the blood of Chiron and Demetrius; Aaron not only stabs the nursemaid and ridicules her for squealing like a pig, he stabs her in her groin; Tamora not only has a mouthful of the pie made of her murdered sons, but with polite greed she has eaten quite a bit of them by the time Titus tells her what she’s been eating. Some audiences see things like these and laugh; I don’t know why – is it too disturbing? Usually people will say things like “it was too over the top” but, you know, that doesn’t make it unrealistic. There was little giggling here. There was some laughter when Titus rebukes his brother for killing a fly, a fly who had parents and children; he doesn’t relent until Marcus says the fly was black and therefore like Aaron. Again, I don’t really see this as just a comic moment, though as with some of King Lear it teeters between the grotesquely funny and the deeply tragic. But it’s also one of those Lear on the heath moments when the hero breaks through into a compassionate ethical insight about the universality of suffering and the moral equivalence of all life (though as Ms. S pointed out, it doesn’t keep Titus from slaughtering his enemies). This production also does not soften the character of Aaron (well played by Peter Macon) – Taymor, in a commentary on her film, somewhat bizarrely says that having a child humanizes Aaron; in fact throughout the play he clearly is becoming more and more demonic, until by the end, like some devilish brother of Puck, he describes his daily cruelties (propping recently dead corpses on their friends’ doorsteps with signs saying Have you forgotten me? and so forth). As with Shylock, our historical experience of racism and Shakespeare’s eagerness to give everyone his or her say can distort our feelings towards the character: we can feel for the self-hatred in “Aaron will have his soul black like his face” or sympathize with his rebellious pride (“is black so base a hue?”), but distasteful to us as it is to pick up on the identification of the Moor with the devil, there’s no use pretending that Aaron is a decent man, or even just the victim of circumstances. At the end of Taymor’s film, the child portraying Lucius (the film's action is presented as this child's imagination of violence and revenge, which accounts for the extremity but not the psychological and moral depth of the violence) takes Aaron’s baby in his arms and runs off with it as if to protect it; at the end of this production, Titus’s grandson Lucius stands over Aaron’s baby with a knife, with the inescapable implication that the slaughter we have just seen has not finished the cycle of violence.

It’s often noted that Shakespeare in Titus was emulating the extreme yet poetically stylized violence of Ovid and Seneca, but it should be noted as well that he is anticipating what Beckett does, which is to take a perception of our condition and make it a concrete metaphor on stage. We sit in jars, near each other but separate, and tell the same story over and over. We are buried in sand, first to our waists and then our necks, and a loaded gun is right by us, and we prattle happily on. We show up every day hoping against hope that a promised savior will finally arrive. And the violent and vengeful kill and eat their own young.