Titus Andronicus, A Comedy of Blood (review)

Contemporary directors may think that Shakespeare didn’t know where he was going with the Thyestes-influenced plot and formulaic revenge tragedy genre in Titus Andronicus, but nothing can be further from the truth. T.S. Eliot would agree that the original Senecan piece—much like Shakespeare’s—is not a nihilistic play about chaos, violence, gore, and cannibalism but a tragedy about justice and tyranny, and the attainment of order by Stoic means. Titus may lack Hamlet’s qualms and poetic language, but he is nonetheless a complex character who is transformed from a resolute Roman soldier with no pity for his sons (or the sons of others) to a pater patrias who is emotionally handicapped by Lavinia’s rape and mutilation. The tragedy is thus a testimony to Shakespeare’s knowledge of Roman history and literature, and is also home to his first reference to Coriolanus, years before he wrote the play. Even though most directors and critics attribute a static quality to Titus because it is the bard’s first, the play also has one of the most colossal female characters of all his works: Tamora. There is no doubt that the excessive violence in the play has method: the Stoic undertones reflect Shakespeare’s structural as well as philosophical adaptation of Senecan tragedy, and the nightmarish spectacles reveal neither the punitive system of the Roman republic nor the realistic aspirations of the playwright—rather, they are the cathartic channels through which the spectator is at once horrified and compelled to think about justice. How is it that a play so well-measured and structured was turned into such a dull circus by Belgium’s Olympique Dramatique?

The Belgian theatre company Olympique Dramatique was established in 1999 by Tom Dewispelaere, Ben Segers, Stijn Van Opstal, and Geert Van Rampelberg, who “felt the need to do their own thing, independently of a director, and so set up their actors’ collective.” Hence this director-less production of Titus Andronicus, A Comedy of Blood opened with a minimalist stage and with actors who were also minimally dressed. The gigantic spotlights and an enormous wooden see-saw dominated the stage, which overall had an incredible sense of depth. All actors remained on stage throughout the play and played multiple roles. Saturninus, Bassianus, and Lavinia wore underwear; Marcus wore business pants and no shirt; and Titus wore a tunic covered in blood and carried a plastic shopping bag filled with body parts. He resembled Timon in his exile years more than a Roman general, and Tamora excessively resembled Jessica Lange in Julie Taymor’s film Titus. Shakespeare’s Lavinia, who is sketched after Philomela and Lucretius and is an epitome of virtue in the play, was hypersexualized in this production. Costume-wise, she was in harmony with Bassianus and Saturninus rather than with her family, which may have been meant to symbolize her true loyalties, or may simply have been a modernization of Lavinia—a semi-mythical Renaissance sex-victim—by sartorial means. The absence of a historical context for the costumes and for the production in general meant that the Roman-Goth distinction in the play was nowhere evident. Even though the playbill described the original text as being utterly racist, the white man Aaron dressed up in a transparent black dress and smeared in black paint did not seem either creative or deconstructive.

But more than the costumes, it was the characters that made this production a bit perplexing and unimaginative for an audience that may not be as familiar with the text of this play as with, for instance, Hamlet. Saturninus, Demetrius and Chiron...