Tarantino meets The Bard in Titus Andronicus
The set of Titus Andronicusat UK’s Guignol Theatre is made from modular steel cages on wheels that can be reconfigured to create all sorts of settings. The most impressive of the mobile set pieces is a huge arch looking like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris made from steel girders. It’s huge, large enough to hold six or seven actors at a time, and its melding of ancient Roman architecture and modern-style construction methods captures the tone of the production: what the cast have called ‘Romington, D.C.’ — a modern version of a Rome that never fell.
The world of this production of TitusAndronicusis a weird amalgam of past and present — business suits with bits of toga fabric,characters talking on cell phones while mentioning Roman deities, and a brown-suited UPS man taking the place of the messenger. Then, of course, there’s the fighting. In addition to some brutal bare-fisted combat, characters brandish a mixture of swords and guns.
“It’s a world like ours,with pieces of old Rome stuck in,” said Director Bo List, who is directing Titus as a guest artist for UK’s Guignol Theatre. “They wanted to do something big and different and a little sexy.”
Titus had never been produced in Lexington before, so List suggested they try that play. “The idea of doing a Shakespeare play that had never been done before was appealing both to me and the department,” he says.
Okay, but sexy? List explains that Titusis sexy “in that it has lots of violence and the possibility for lots of sexuality. It’s mean and cruel and weird.”
That meanness and cruelty and weirdness are mostly responsible for keeping Titus Andronicus as one of the Bard’s little-known and rarely produced plays.The play’s title character is a Roman general who returns from a victorious battle bearing both the captured rulers of his defeated foes and the bodies of his sons. But the horrors he finds at home when the Roman emperor turns on him outweigh anything he faced on the battlefield.
The text was cut by a third to keep the play to about two hours. There are live musical elements, lots of fights, and plenty of choreography; sometimes, the choreography tells the story more than the actors’ lines do. The play opens with a massive battle between the forces of Rome, led by Titus, and the barbarian Goths, led by their queen Tamora and her two sons. Later in the play, actors sing harmonized songs to underscore key moments in the play, and live percussion underscores key fights in the play.
“One things that is very good about working in the college environment is the energy, the passion, the fearlessness that goes along with being that age,” List says. His cast members agree.
“This production is jam-packed with intense fight choreography, special effects and intricate set pieces,” says Dara Jade Tiller, who plays the Goth queen Tamora in the production. “It’s easy to put acting and the text in the backseat when you are trying to work with all of these elements, but that is just not feasible with Shakespeare.”
One of the challenges the cast has faced is the number and frequency of fight sequences. “I am trained in stage combat through the Society of American Fight Directors, so I serve as one of the fight captains for the show,” Tiller said. “Stage combat is one of my favorite things to do,so it has been a pleasure to see people who have never had training come so far in such a short amount of time. Also, it is easy for stage fighting to seem like a ‘manly’ thing to do,so I have enjoyed showing that the girls can kick ass as well.”
Titus is also famous for the buckets of stage blood that wind up spilled on the stage by the play’s end. In the play’s very first scene, a character is disem- boweled, and that is followed later by three hands being chopped off, two throats cut, and the baking of a rather unappetizing human pie. All this carnage means that the play has more in common with the modern-day bloodfests of Hollywood than some of Shakespeare’s other plays.
Ryan Hastings, who plays Tamora’s son, Chiron, says that that comparison has been made often by the cast. “During the production it has been agreed by many of us that this is Shakespearean Pulp Fiction, the literary love child of Quentin Tarantino and the Bard,” he says.
“It’s the Saw of Shakespeare’s day,” Tiller says. “However, it carries an intense message behind the horror and gore. Every character feels that he or she is justified in their actions,no matter the consequences.”