As befits one of his earliest plays, Titus Andronicus has all the hallmarks of a Shakespeare honing his craft in a studenty troupe full of bold ideas, incautious language, over-weening self-belief and insufficiently critical friends. By the close of the piece, an audience will have sat through a parade of fourteen corpses, ten amputated body parts, rape, cannibalism, filicide, attempted infanticide, adultery, and repeated racism. Unrisen gorges optional: protective gear on the front row advised.
An eye for an eye will make the world go blind
And yet, despite its blood-soaked reputation for showcasing Bill’s Tarantino years, Titus is more than just a titillating splash about in the Grand-Guignol: offering a commentary on the breakdown of civic order and the futility of revenge as compelling and chilling today as it was four centuries ago.
In Max Webster’s mighty new production for the RSC, we are treated to a dystopian ‘Rome’ in which the stark monochromatic world reflects its characters’ souls: murky greys abound, and any purer whites are almost immediately tainted with blood spatters. This bleak colour palette not only creates the nightmarish parallel reality in which our worst fears come to life; but underpins the continual exploration of blackness as a symbol of evil.
Joanna Scotcher’s spare, glassy set perches atop a huge stone slab etched with word after Latin word: engravings soon to become grimed with the DNA of those lives sacrificed upon the altar of high politics. Utilitarian benches are spaced at intervals. An electronically controlled slaughterhouse track runs overhead.
At the outset, the Roman Emperor has died and his sons Saturninus and Bassianus are competing to be elected in his place. The people would prefer renowned general Titus Andronicus: but he refuses the honour, backs Saturninus, and gets on with the business of presenting the prisoners he has taken during his war with the Goths. Simon Russell Beale’s Titus is doughty and clear-eyed: a man of war but also of logic, able to make inhuman decisions in the name of supposed justice. He tells us that he has lost twenty-one of his sons in battle: and to avenge their memories, orders the dismemberment and thus murder of the Goth Queen’s eldest son. And so begins the cycle of violence for which the play is both much admired and reviled.
Wendy Kweh is a fantastic Tamora, the captured Queen: sinewy, serpentine, impulsive, unflinching. This is a woman you cross at your peril: as Lavinia (an initially horsey, haughty Letty Thomas) soon discovers. Tamora fights for survival with a bestial reactivity and cunning: a motif explored throughout the piece as an increasingly tenuous hold on humanity dissolves. In a text peppered with references to the ‘hunt’, the cast morph into a series of snarling creatures which may be the predator, may be the prey. Jade Hackett’s choreography is a stunning representation of how the omnipresent perils of our own baser natures lie far closer to the surface than we would like to admit.
For just as a fish rots from its head, so does Rome collapse under the arrogant, swaggering leadership of a snivelling, coked-up Saturninus (a horribly redolent Joshua James). Plots are laid, inductions dangerous… and lives are snuffed out with such gay abandon that the hardest task for any director is to evoke credibility within a plot that, to our sensibilities, seems incredible. Webster offers enough familiarity for us to fear such a world; and indeed, there is already horrid symmetry in the actions of those who would righteously kill a baby for its skin colour or consider someone else’s body to fall under their own jurisdiction.
There are superb performances throughout: the ever-reliable Emma Fielding becoming ‘Marcia’ Andronicus, Jeremy Ang Jones showing huge promise at speaking verse with modernity and purpose, and Natey Jones making the essentially one-dimensional Aaron psychologically plausible. This is a terrific ensemble in which each player feeds into the narrative; and whilst the stage is naturally never less than electrified when Russell Beale is in situ, his performance is generous enough to build a layered sense of tragedy which never feels purely orbital.
There is no resolution here, no happy ever after: and as the young heir to the Andronicii watches the adults around him tear each other apart, we have never felt surer that an eye for eye will surely make the world go blind.
