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http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1046944,00.html
Off with their hands
It is Shakespeare's least-known and most
bloody play. Bill Alexander on how he brought Titus
Andronicus to the stage
Bill Alexander
Monday September 22,
2003
The Guardian
February:
I'm back at the RSC for the first time in 12 years, to
direct Titus Andronicus. The play is rarely done and
is said to be difficult - which are, I suppose, the things
that attract me to it. It's also wonderful that audiences
don't really know the plot at all, which you can't say for
Hamlet or Macbeth.That said, they do know its
reputation for bloodiness - the very thing that makes the
play seem so tricky to stage.
March:
David Bradley has agreed to play Titus Andronicus. The
marketing department seem pleased. When I ask about their
excitement, they say:
"Haven't you seen Harry Potter?"
"No."
"Well, David plays Filch."
"Flinch?"
"No, Filch, the caretaker."
"Oh."
"He's an international face."
"Is it a big part, this Flitch?"
"Filch! No, well, yes, er, he makes a lot of
appearances."
"But, do you think Titus Andronicus and Harry Potter have
the same audience?"
I have a sudden, terrible image in my head of thousands of
school children dressed as wizards and witches with
broomsticks and autograph books pouring into the Stratford
auditorium to see their hero and being deeply, deeply
disappointed.
April:
Titus is set in an invented ancient Rome. I'm now
deep into research, and could write a small book about the
difference between Republican Rome and Imperial Rome, the
Roman gods, the boundaries of the empire at various dates,
the number and nature of tribunes, senators, quaestors,
patricians and priests, not to mention the punishments for
vestal virgins if they were caught having sex, and the
difference between the Temple of Jupiter and the Senate
House or Curia, which the Elizabethans confused because they
didn't have archaeology. But then I remember that, necessary
though it is, you can become obsessed with research to the
point where it becomes just a sophisticated form of pencil
sharpening, a way of putting off the hard thinking that is
about doing the play.
May:
I'm carefully reading the Arden edition of Titus,
which, unlike most copies of Shakespeare plays, has plenty
of references to past productions. One in particular is
mentioned on nearly every page: Deborah Warner's 1987
production for the RSC. I saw it myself in the Swan and it
was, indeed, wonderful. It also made total sense of a play
that everyone thought was undoable, largely because everyone
had been told it was undoable. However, no director likes to
be constantly told how brilliant another director's previous
production was. Time to stop reading the Arden in case I
come across more ideas I can't use because they were used by
Warner.
June:
Now totally immersed in the text of Titus, and it
really is throwing up problems. It is breathtaking, vivid
and thrilling, but Shakespeare was only 27 when he wrote it,
right at the beginning of his writing life, and as the
principal inventor of theatrical psychological realism, he
still had a way to travel.
The main problem for a modern production of Titus is
getting the tone right - finding a balance between the
horror and dark humour of the play. Shakespeare's audience
must have had a profoundly different relationship to
physical violence from us. They had a judicial system that
made violence acceptable and public as part of its code.
People were used to seeing their fellow humans hanging from
gallows, thieves with amputated hands, heads displayed on
bridges, traitors disembowelled on scaffolds. They must have
developed a sense of humour about it in a way we find
difficult.
I've also discovered what I like about Titus: it's
the best play about revenge that I can think of. Revenge is
such a difficult idea to deal with. Everyone knows it's "a
bad thing", yet everyone understands the phrase "revenge is
sweet". Titus shows revenge's seductiveness, the impulse in
us all that the law is there to control. It is a work of
lurid genius because it reminds us of the fundamental truths
about the role of law in a just society.
July:
Rehearsals have begun. It's good to have people to talk with
about the play when it has been battering about inside my
head for so long. We are having to work hard to avoid the
"bad laugh" - the audience finding the violence funny
instead of shocking. In one particularly difficult scene
near the end, three tit-for-tat stabbings follow in rapid
succession. Getting the rhythm and the timing exactly right
is crucial, and I have relied on the fight director, Malcolm
Ranson, to come up with techniques that combine realism and
safety. This is the kind of thing film-makers can do very
easily; in front of a live audience it's much harder to make
it convincing.
There's another problem: the pie served to Titus, made out
of the corpses of his sons. Getting it right is tricky, but
eventually we develop a pie with a rich brown pastry crust
and... a filling of salmon (which has a slight resemblance
to human flesh), spinach, carrots and potatoes. RSC props is
going to make the recipe available for hardier members of
the audience.
August:
Another arrival from the props department - the prototype of
my hand-chopping device. Basically it's a wooden bucket with
a hole in the side, big enough to accommodate a hand, and a
lid on the top with a slit in it. You insert a
vicious-looking cleaver into the slit, then wait until the
victim has placed their arm in the hole and wham the cleaver
down. Assuming the victim acts well enough, this should be
utterly convincing.
I start having great fun demonstrating it to anyone who is
interested; everyone seems quite impressed. Then Joe Dixon,
who plays Aron and is going to have to use the thing, comes
in. I show him how it works.
"Couldn't I just come on and cut his hand off?" he asks.
"Umm."
"I mean, not really, obviously."
"No, obviously."
"It's just that it looks a bit... "
"A bit what?"
"Well... contrived."
"Ah."
"I mean it looks like something that's been made specially
for cutting hands off."
"Yes, but it won't quite be like this. This is more of a
wash tub. The real thing will be like a bucket."
"With a hole in the side?"
A week later my beautiful wooden hand-chopping bucket
arrives looking just as I had imagined it and I feel
painfully wistful. It's heading for my garden and a meeting
with some geraniums.
September:
We're now into previews, and learning a lot about how the
play works. One person has fainted - a man - and the cast
have promised to keep a count of all the faints in the
run.
I think about Warner's production. She took the play
seriously and showed it wasn't just a bizarre romp, a
grotesque Elizabethan blood-fest purely for sensation. It's
about pity and love as well as violence and revenge, and how
the beauty of language can be a balm that helps protect us
against barbarity. I hope my production conveys all
that.
At the Royal Shakespeare Theatre,
Stratford-Upon-Avon until November 7. Box office: 0870 609
1110.
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