Titus Andronicus
the Stratford Festival
The National Post

There are 24 named characters in the standard texts of Titus Andronicus, and by the end of the play, 14 of them are either dead or under sentence of same. Two of the deceased have, while alive, been raped or mutilated or both; another two, brothers, have been ground into paste and served up in a pie, to be consumed by their own mother. The play is the earliest-written of Shakespeare's Roman tragedies (it may even, though I personally doubt it, have been his earliest play of any kind) but it's the latest set. In fact, it's hardly historical at all, though it does seem to be taking place in the last years of the Empire, with Rome at war with the Goths who were eventually to overthrow it. From what the play shows us, Rome had it coming.

Darko Tresnjak's Stratford production actually manages to up the play's mortality rate. Shakespeare calls for a mere four killings in his concluding banquet scene. Tresnjak ends with a veritable orgy of arbitrary homicides, in which a hitherto blameless male child takes an enthusiastic part. This is one of the few false steps in a generally disciplined and exciting production. It runs counter to the spirit in which all the previous killings have been committed.

Every one of them has had a motive. Every murderer has considered himself (no woman directly sheds blood in this play) to be justified. There's a code. In breaching it, the production is probably trying to make a point, about violence being contagious. But that's something we hardly need to be told; doing it this way seems frivolous and self-congratulatory. For much of the play, the house lights have been up, as if to confront us directly with the violence. But a production that aims to be that tough on the audience has to be equally tough on itself. And until we get to that finale, this one is.

The play begins with Titus, aged and honoured Roman general, returning victorious from a campaign in which he's lost 21 of his 25 sons. (Another three will shortly follow, one of them dispatched by Titus himself.) He's pulling a covered wagon that we assume contains his offspring's honoured corpses. But when the covers are pulled off we behold, in a tremendous coup that had me in the production's corner thenceforward, a cage in which cower, naked and afraid, the Gothic queen Tamora, her three sons and her black lover, Aaron the Moor.

Titus's surviving sons demand the eldest Goth prince as a sacrifice; he agrees, and seems genuinely surprised that Tamora should object. From then on she is, naturally, his mortal enemy; and when she catches the eye of the new Roman emperor Saturninus and marries him, she holds the aces. She encourages her two sons to ravish Titus' newly married daughter Lavinia and to cut off her hands and tongue to prevent her from either telling or writing who did it to her; and she has two of Titus's boys framed for the murder of Lavinia's husband. Hence, eventually, Titus's culinary revenge. And even though he struck the first blow, and the final blood count is about even, we do mostly sympathize with him, for several reasons. First, the story is told largely from his point of view. Second, we get to know and even like him and what remains of his household. Third, he's the victim of several dirty tricks and while he rages, mourns and goes a kind of mad, his enemies gloat, which is not endearing.

John Vickery is an actor whose best Stratford performances, in Zastrozzi and The Grapes of Wrath, have been outside of Shakespeare, and whose classical work has been uniformly stolid. But as Titus, he makes that stolidity work for him, presenting a man with limited horizons and an iron sense of duty who simply cannot understand what is being done to him. He's a Stoic driven beyond stoicism, a limited but logical mind crazed by illogical pressures, a plight in which the cankered quizzical humour that Vickery found in Zastrozzi comes in very useful and proves surprisingly moving.

Another happy surprise is the hitherto bland Dion Johnstone, giving a smooth and dangerous performance of Aaron, the play's unrepentant evil genius and a very cool dude, indeed. Neither of these actors sounds his character's fullest depths, but both are excellent.

Claire Lautier's Tamora is splendid when pleading for her son's life, and later when got up as a giant masked bat to impersonate the spirit of Revenge, but lightweight for what comes between; Amanda Lisman's Lavinia, by contrast, is disconcertingly matronly when inviolate but a wrenching vengeful apparition afterwards (which means for most of the play). David Ferry is urgent and sympathetic as Titus's civilian brother, the nearest thing the play affords to a nice guy; Sean Arbuckle shows as Saturninus how thoroughly Shakespeare anticipated Hollywood's idea of the Roman emperor as whimpering tyrant.

The director's program note claims that "this gruesome play, is also very funny and very beautiful." In fact, it isn't all that funny (compulsive Elizabethan wordplay doesn't count) and in practice and to his credit Tresnjak hasn't tried to make it so: which is one reason his imposed ending is so out of place. But the play's unflinchingness is beautiful, and beautifully illuminated (literally) when we are kept gazing for the longest time at an axe about to descend on a human hand and a man, for the noblest reasons, awaiting the blow.