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by William Shakespeare, directed by Darko Tresnjak

Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

July 14-September 24, 2011

The Stratford Festival has not mounted a full-length Titus Andronicus since 1978.  It did stage Titus in 1989 but that production cut the play down to one act and put it on a double-bill with The Comedy of Errors, also pared to one act.  Since the present production, believe it or not, views The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, to use the work’s full title, as a comedy, it does even more injustice to the play than the 1989 production.  If seeing all of Shakespeare’s plays on stage is part of your bucket list, that might provide some motive to subject yourself to this production.  Otherwise, director Darko Tresnjak’s production does no honour to the play, Shakespeare or the Festival.

Titus, Shakespeare’s first and bloodiest tragedy, is written in the style of the “revenge tragedy” then in vogue in London with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1590) as its chief representative.  Although the revenge tragedy is most famous for showing numerous gruesome deaths and mutilations on stage, there was a moral purpose behind it.  The inspiration for such plays was the tragedies of Seneca the Younger (4bc-65ad), a Stoic philosopher and Nero’s tutor, who depicted characters of unbridled passion and violence such as Medea and Thyestes as exempla horrenda of what can happen when reason cannot control emotion.  For Elizabethan dramatists who witnessed the bloodshed between Protestants and Catholics in the struggle between Elizabeth I and Mary I, scenes where the people take justice into their own hands function as critiques both of weak government and of tyranny.            

In the completely fictional action of the play, the war hero Titus returns to Rome after his successful wars against the Goths only to find the city divided over who should succeed the recently deceased emperor--his elder but egotistic son Saturninus or his younger son Bassianus betrothed to Titus’s daughter Lavinia.  As a solution, Titus’s brother Marcus says that the people’s choice is Titus himself, but Titus rejects that honour and, as an upholder of tradition, hands the government to Saturninus, who immediately shows his true colours by announcing he, not Bassianus will wed Lavinia.  As soon as Saturninus catches a glimpse of Titus’s captive, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, he rejects Lavinia and vows to wed her instead.  This opens the door to Tamora and her two sons to power in Rome and opportunity to revenge themselves on Titus and his family.  Their revenge is so horrific it finally causes Titus to break the code of honour that has guided him throughout his life and to outdo the Goths in planning revenge on them.  In the background of all this bloodshed is Titus’s eldest son Lucius, who, rather than take revenge on the child born to Tamora and her paramour Aaron, vows to protect it.  Like Richmond at the end of Richard III, he represents a return to sanity in a world gone mad.

The idea that the play has any meaning at all is completely lost in Serbian-American director Darko Tresnjak’s idiotic production.  In his Director’s Notes in the programme he states, “For me, the most fascinating aspect of this gruesome play is that it is also very funny and very beautiful”.  This is a play where Lavinia is raped, her tongue cut out and her hands cut off; where Aaron tricks Titus into cutting off his hand out of pure malice; where Titus makes pies from the flesh of Tamora’s sons and feed them to her.  One has to have an extraordinarily perverse view of the world and the play to finds these events either “very funny or very beautiful”. 

Yet, that is what Tresnjak tries to show.  He tries to makes Tamora’s sons Chiron and Demetrius into the comic relief of the play.  Their fighting among themselves is not threatening but staged as slapstick.  They are portrayed not as evil but doltish in a vain attempt to mitigate the horror of what they do to Lavinia.  Tresnjak tries to make Titus’s own behanding scene comic by giving the action several false starts as Titus decides which hand it should be and how Aaron should hold it when he lowers the axe.  Through foolishness like this Tresnjak reveals he really has no sympathy for the characters and no idea that Titus’s tragedy is to be driven into revenge. 

To top it off, Tresnjak completely trivializes the final banquet scene.  In the text Titus has ground the bones of Tamora’s sons into flour and used it to make meat pasties with a filling made from her sons’ flesh.  Instead, of this, Tresnjak has Titus and his servants enter with strawberry mini-tarts on silver trays which they offer not just to Tamora and Saturninus but to the audience as well.  Tresnjak wants us to laugh at the ghoulishness but only makes us deplore his grotesque abuse of the text.  In Shakespeare, the banquet results in the deaths of Lavinia, Tamora, Saturninus and Titus.  In Tresnjak’s version a completely unmotivated fight breaks out between the Roman servants and the invited Goths resulting in ten more bodies littering the stage.  He must think this is funny and beautiful since he uses a confetti canon to shoot red confetti over the bodies.  And, as if that were not enough, he cuts 119 of the last 134 lines, so that Lucius does not accept the crown as the next emperor but rather hands it to a member of the audience as he walks out.  Tresnjak thus throws away the ending just as he has thrown away the whole play. 

American actor John Vickery, brought to Stratford by Artistic Director Des McAnuff, displaces several far more able Canadian actors, including Stratford stalwart Wayne Best who is his understudy, in the title role.  Vickery is good enough in the very first scenes, but soon his infatuation with his own resonant voice begins to trump meaning and all we hear are its rising and falling, preferably by an octave to show importance, rather any insightful line readings.  Unsurprisingly, he insane Titus is indistinguishable from his sane Titus. 

Of the rest of the cast, Claire Lautier fares best as Tamora, suitable seductive with Saturninus and villainous with her sons, though seemingly unable to show anything more complex.  Dion Johnstone speaks Aaron’s line very well, but somehow cannot bring himself to embody the absolute evil they imply.  He is more comfortable when Aaron shows his love for his infant son than when plotting dastardly deeds.  Sean Arbuckle, who created a nicely psychopathic Catesby in Richard III, tries hard but fails to do the same as Saturninus.  David Ferry is justly acclaimed for his performances in modern plays, but he simply cannot speak Shakespearean verse much less make it sound convincing.  Paul Fauteux, though miscast, does a creditable job of maintaining some sense of nobility throughout the action. 

We feel sorry for Amanda Lisman more for how she is abused by Tresnjak than by Tamora’s sons.  After her rape and mutilation, Tresnjak has her whimper unceasingly from that on until it becomes annoying.  When Titus asks her to carry his severed hand out in her mouth, someone could give it to her.  Instead, Tresnjak first has a dog walk past and lick it and then has Lisman bend down like a dog to pick it up while the men stand about and watch.  Which one is this then--funny or beautiful?  In the text, Titus kills Tamora’s sons.  Here, Tresnjak has Lavinia’s stumps outfitted with enormous blades which she uses to rush at Tamora’s sons held bent over in front of her.  In Tresnjak’s 2006 staging for the Old Globe in San Diego her stumps sported two pokers to give the boys an Edward II-style finale.

As set designer, Tresnjak has raised the stage at least a foot and a half about the auditorium floor but gives the actors to step to use so that they have to jump indecorously on and off.  Costume designer Linda Cho has made the Roman tunics for the men so short that we see the actors’ underwear whenever they sit down.  She gives Tamora a crown with two ludicrous dangling ornaments so large that Claire Lautier has to turn her head slowly to avoid being hit in the face by them.  

It’s one thing when a text contains rape and murder.  It’s quite another when a director deliberately violates the text and kills a play’s meaning.  The result is neither funny nor beautiful.  It is frightening--not because of the content of the action--but because such a gross trivialization of Shakespeare should see the light at Stratford.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: John Vickery as Titus. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For Tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.