Globe to Globe blog: The silence of the limbs

GILES: Before the sun and shadows have even had time to make a
proper exit the rapes begin. Titus. Shakespeare’s most fucked up play.
In Cantanese. Lopped off hands and heads. Cut out tongues. Flies stabbed
with daggers. Interracial bastard babies with nooses round their necks.
Pies made of head meat. Maternal cannibalism. Boy William decided
that nothing less than a mardi gras of horror would do for his next play
after the knotty monotony of Henry VI – Part 1 and he wastes no time in
getting to the gore.

DAN: The old Roman war dog Titus comes back from the battles having
served Rome well, bringing with him Gothic fundamentalist terror
suspects Tamora and her boys. His daughter Lavinia refuses to marry
the new emperor and that’s when the shit kicks off. The emperor
marries Tamora instead and once she’s got her laurel wreath polished
and her Gothic feet up in the palace she sets about getting revenge on
Titus and his lot.

GILES: The play started with all the actors on chairs in a semicircle
along the front of the apron. Talking out into the auditorium. Not
looking at each other. After about ten minutes of this there was a
sickening realization ran through the entire audience that this was how
they were going to do the whole show! People started to shift and notice
each other. THEN the chairs were removed and conventional story
telling staging resumed. Shakespeare makes his plays so that you can
be in the forest on one line and in the palace the next and no theatre
serves this idea as well as the Globe.

DAN: Mark Rylance told us when we interviewed him for our film that
the connection of the players to the audience is one of the most
important things to him now. “Anything that happens in that
performance is part of the play. Anything the audience say or do is part
of it. We can see them, and we are all part of the performance.” Amen
Brother Rylance. Amen. What we see here during this brilliant festival
is that you ignore the audience at your peril.

GILES: “Sshhh!!!” The burgers are spot on at the Globe but the
wrappers they come in compete with the jet liners coming in and going
out overhead. This girl to our left Shhhed so loudly that everyone
turned and looked right at her, and then SHE was Shhhed by someone
for Shhhing. I think the play was encouraging confrontation.

DAN: It’s a young mans’ play. It’s like that killer first album from
Hendrix or Nirvana. It’s got balls. But like lots of Shakespeare’s plays it
has as many ideas/things about it which are so alien to anything else
that one could find in the other plays – which could be argument to say
its not Shakespeare at all – as there are flourishes of his signature
genius. For instance Aaron the Moor – Black and villainous carrying
around this baby, his son by Tamora, defending it and destroying all
those who mean it harm. I can’t think of anything else in Shakespeare
quite like it and yet it’s exactly the kind of thing his genius would
promote.

There’s something biblical about the story. It’s like something you’d
hear out of the Old Testament. Some old duffer who’s got to carve
himself and his loved ones up for the satisfaction of the Lord, who in
turn laughs and washes them all away into the sea, and the fact that we
KNOW that what ever happens things can only get worse for our hero
draws us in even more. But unlike the other great tragedies it’s hard in
this play to see why our hero must suffer. And no one suffers like Titus.

GILES: In this production the actor starts low. Only in hindsight do we
see he knew he had a lot of wow to go. As the story unfolds each scene
brings on a fresh horror for Titus just as he’s had time to accept the last
one heaped on him. The play contains one of my favourite lines in
Shakespeare:-

“For now I stand as one upon a rock,
Environed with a wilderness of sea.”

They reckon he wrote Richard III after Titus, which kinda makes sense.
Titus was Shakespeare’s first big hit. The Silence of the Lambs of its
day. And Richard is all the juicy bits of Emperor Saturnine, Titus,
Tamora and Aaron rolled into one crookbacked, devious, clawhanded
pie.

Who’s next……?

Follow all our Summer 2012 coverage at www.whatsonstage.com/summer2012