Date: 13th May 2004

Reviewer: Rebecca Nesvet

All writers have bad days. Kubrick had Eyes Wide Shut. Shakespeare had Titus Andronicus. That’s the myth, anyway. Director Antonio Ferrara, however, is convinced that Titus isn’t in fact a basket case, though, in Ferrara’s staging, its protagonist certainly becomes one. This production, by the University of Wales, Aberystwyth’s Nomadic Players, runs through Friday 14 May. To see it, meet the Nomads’ front-of-house people outside Rummer’s Wine Bar at 7pm to be shown to the Tregaron Warehouse, inside which the ‘film set’ has been created. Dress warm, and be prepared to spend the performance walking around the set as the actors repeatedly move stage. Ferrara used this technique in the surreal Macbeth he directed in the ruins of Aberystwyth Castle, and it’s surprisingly easy to get used to.

Conspicuously inspired by Get Carter, Reservoir Dogs, the Godfather series, and other gangster films, this Titus maintains a cool, noir-ish feel. The characters’ characteristically ancient Roman Stoicism makes sense in such a world. Ferrara works unapologetically with the unreality of Titus’s notorious violence, emphasizing his characters’ callousness and emotional numbness. The laws of their society trump both reason and feeling. This is the piece’s real tragedy. Ferrara uses what he calls a “farce” interpretation to throw this phenomenon in the audience’s faces—rather as Tarantino does. Sometimes it works. Three Roman scions bickering over who should have the honour of self-amputation for the benefit of the family, all completely oblivious to the fact they’re being set up, is funny, in a demoniacal kind of way. The film concept is most effective at a moment late in the play when Titus takes note of the ‘film crew’ at work off-‘set’ and decides to drag those outside into the action.

There were several great performances in the ensemble cast. As Tamora, the vengeful Queen of the Goths, Helen McIntyre stole the show. Shakespeare compares her to a ‘tiger’, apparently alluding to the fearsome ‘Hyrcanian Tigers’ described a few decades earlier, in another Roman story, by Marlowe. McIntyre really acts like a tiger: slinky, superficially lazy, but with sudden bursts of fierceness. One could actually believe that her Tamora, unlike Michelle Feiffer’s in Julie Taymor’s film Titus, had ruled a warlike country and is not accustomed to captivity. Saturninus (Alex Boyce) was a convincingly haughty and politique Roman emperor. Titus’s daughter Lavinia (Lizzie Bowen) and son Lucius (Glyn Williams) lend some welcome human emotion to the proceedings. Three fate-like creatures (Jen Banks, Rhiannon Bevan, and Melissa Dunne) ethereally act a tragic mime in which they fight with the traumatized Lavinia, personifying her own competing desperate feelings.

Tamora’s vicious sons Demetrius (Steph Gunner) and Cheiron (Joe Skokeld) acted their roles well. Casting a woman as Demetrius might have succeeded, had not Ferrara choreographed the brothers in incestuous couplings in which Gunner was clearly coded as the female in a stereotypically heterosexual dynamic. The cross-gender casting is a good step toward resolving the Nomadics’ multiple-play drought of roles for women, and I think Ferrara is onto something about the incest in Titus. However, the Gothic princes are definitely brothers, and should be played as such—regardless of the gender of the players cast as them.

There are a few problems with this production that detract from the play’s power, especially in the first half. Titus should not deliver his most powerful and conflict-driven soliloquies doubled over, facing away from the audience, and speaking directly into the concrete floor. It does not matter that this works for Al Pacino—his lines were coming from a sound recording, not from the actual space he occupied during filming. In fact, many of the actors needed to learn to speak louder and more clearly, in both audio recordings and the cavernous space of the warehouse. Dealing with less than ideal acoustics is one of the challenges of site-specific theatre.

Finally, some of the characters who were killed off the earliest were played very weakly, with too-rapid, garbled speech, and little attempt at characterization. Ferrara has wisely assured a strong ending by generally giving the strongest actors the roles with the most longevity, but this makes some early scenes hard to follow. In particular, Lavinia’s doomed bridegroom needs to be more impetuous and to seem to really want her and strongly oppose those who would interfere with their elopement, including his own brother and Emperor. He is a Romeo—albeit in an alternate world where Romeo is not the title character—but that shouldn’t make him any less desperate in his love.

However, there is much to enjoy in this production, particularly if you’re a gangster film buff and want to see some of that genre’s most iconic scenarios live.