Titus Andronicus, and: Coriolanus (review)

The 2006 Globe season marked the debut of Dominic Dromgoole as artistic director after nine years of the inventive, if sometimes controversial, leadership of Mark Rylance. For his initial run, Dromgoole chose to stage three of Shakespeare's four Roman plays, omitting only Julius Caesar while adding The Comedy of Errors and two non-Shakespearean productions, Simon Bent's Under the Black Flag and Howard Brenton's In Extremis: The Story of Abelard and Heloise, to round out the season's ambitious schedule. The entire bill of fare was promoted under the title "The Edges of Rome," with posters, programs, schedules, and even individual performance tickets bearing the emblem of a blood-red victory (or funeral?) wreath against a white background (or, conversely, of a ghostly white wreath against a red background). Coriolanus, directed by Dromgoole himself, opened the season in early May before being joined two weeks later by Lucy Bailey's production of Titus. The two plays then ran in repertory for five weeks before the opening in late June of a much-anticipated Antony and Cleopatra, also directed by Dromgoole, with the other three plays scheduled for openings later in the summer.

The productions of Coriolanus and Titus were clearly counted upon to carry much of the responsibility for making a successful transition from one supervisory regime to the next, and, judging from the generally positive responses from the corps of London reviewers, as well as from the solid box-office sales that both plays seemed to generate, the ploy was successful. Above all, devotees of the Globe appeared to be curious whether Dromgoole would continue to emphasize the more free-wheeling, experimental elements of the venue's approach to interactive theatre while, perhaps, managing to avoid some of the perceived pitfalls of Rylance's sometimes eccentric artistic choices. Certainly, the choice of Roman tragedy as the exclusive fare for the 2006 season's first nine weeks signaled a movement towards gravitas; at the same time, the staging strategies for both Titus and Coriolanus indicated an interest on the part of the two directors in continuing to take the dramatic action quite literally to its audience, making extensive use of the yard and the groundlings.

Figure 1.

Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare's Globe. Photographer John Tramper.

The seven weeks during which the productions of Titus and Coriolanus retained sole possession of the Globe stage indicated that Dromgoole presumably wanted his theatre-goers (assuming they attended both productions) to consider Shakespeare's first and last tragedies from a comparative perspective. The notion made some thematic sense, since, despite their differences in theme, tone, and technique, both plays involve heroes who become alienated from their communities and, as a result, seek to carry out revenge upon those communities. The role of Lucius in Titus as a banished figure who in his anticipated march on Rome at the head of a Gothic army threatens "to do / As much as ever Coriolanus did" highlights a structural pattern shared by both plays. At the same time, costuming, stage design, and musical embellishments helped to keep the productions sufficiently separate from each other.

Upon entering the yard for performances of Titus, groundlings were warned by signs posted on the doors to...