cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2012-06-07 09:47 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2012-06-07 09:47 pm
Titus Andronicus
Just got back from an 80 minute all-male performance of Titus Andronicus, a Shakespeare play where all I knew going in was that someone’s children get baked in a pie. My expectations were satisfied (although I hadn’t anticipated the cook in a Denny’s outfit capering gleefully and going “nom nom nom!” in the background at the appropriate moment), and it was also very good; dark, fast, funny and appalling. I don’t see how you could possibly do it as anything other than farce in parts, actually, for all that it’s a play that stems very much from one character’s tragic flaw (also, I don’t know what happens with all the extra time, although I suspect a lot of monologuing. Hmm. And having just checked on-line, more sex and violence).
It’s done by the drama school, and is alternating nights with an all-female Romeo and Juliet (booked out, although Titus was actually my first preference). I presume they’re using different theatres; the staging for Titus was very effective, but Romeo and Juliet probably needs less of a post-apocalyptic schoolyard feel to it. The play started bang on time, as well, with the cast (in vast amounts of eyeliner – they are, some of the time, Goths) tossing round a teddy-bear in a game of keep-away, while one of them (pinned down on stage) tries to get it back. The audience was a bit less prompt and kept filtering in through the first five minutes of this, hampered slightly by the fact that the stage itself was between the door and the seating. When everyone was seated, the pinned-down guy made a final grab for the teddy-bear; was caught, stripped and had his kneepads taped to his chest, becoming Queen Tamora of the Goths, who made one last attempt to plead for the life of her son the teddy-bear before teddy was whisked off stage and returned with his head on a pike. An awful lot of bloody vengeance ensues.
I had not expected quite so many amputations. Or, in fact, Lavinia, who after being pushed in in a shopping trolley by Tamora’s sons, who are singing Kenny Roger’s The Gambler, emerges with both hands and her tongue cut off, and having been raped - she actually gets quite a lot to do after that (her father orders her to do things like pick up his own severed hand in her teeth), as well as finally identifying her assault and her assailants by flicking through the pages of Where the Wild Things Are (standing in for Ovid’s Metamorphoses) with her mouth, and then writing their names in chalk, gripped also between her teeth. Her performance at the final banquet was also very well done. They were all good, though, with the possible exception of Saturninus, and the guy who doubled Bassianus and Aaron did it so well that I thought there were two of him until only one showed up at the end to bow. I've seen excellent productions by this school before -they did Howard Barker's Victory some years back, which was brilliant - and I look forward to seeing what they all do next.
It’s done by the drama school, and is alternating nights with an all-female Romeo and Juliet (booked out, although Titus was actually my first preference). I presume they’re using different theatres; the staging for Titus was very effective, but Romeo and Juliet probably needs less of a post-apocalyptic schoolyard feel to it. The play started bang on time, as well, with the cast (in vast amounts of eyeliner – they are, some of the time, Goths) tossing round a teddy-bear in a game of keep-away, while one of them (pinned down on stage) tries to get it back. The audience was a bit less prompt and kept filtering in through the first five minutes of this, hampered slightly by the fact that the stage itself was between the door and the seating. When everyone was seated, the pinned-down guy made a final grab for the teddy-bear; was caught, stripped and had his kneepads taped to his chest, becoming Queen Tamora of the Goths, who made one last attempt to plead for the life of her son the teddy-bear before teddy was whisked off stage and returned with his head on a pike. An awful lot of bloody vengeance ensues.
I had not expected quite so many amputations. Or, in fact, Lavinia, who after being pushed in in a shopping trolley by Tamora’s sons, who are singing Kenny Roger’s The Gambler, emerges with both hands and her tongue cut off, and having been raped - she actually gets quite a lot to do after that (her father orders her to do things like pick up his own severed hand in her teeth), as well as finally identifying her assault and her assailants by flicking through the pages of Where the Wild Things Are (standing in for Ovid’s Metamorphoses) with her mouth, and then writing their names in chalk, gripped also between her teeth. Her performance at the final banquet was also very well done. They were all good, though, with the possible exception of Saturninus, and the guy who doubled Bassianus and Aaron did it so well that I thought there were two of him until only one showed up at the end to bow. I've seen excellent productions by this school before -they did Howard Barker's Victory some years back, which was brilliant - and I look forward to seeing what they all do next.