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Home , Katy Stephens, Theatre of Blood

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE William Shakespeare lived for fifty-two years. In that time he produced approximately forty plays that we know of, as well as sonnets and poems, which together form the greatest, most compelling body of work in the English language. ELCOME to the RSC and the Swan Theatre. I hope you enjoy today’s performance of , directed by Michael Fentiman. 1580-1590 If it’s the first time you’ve visited us please explore the rest of our building, and if you’ve been many times I hope you’ll still be able to find something new in our exhibition spaces, bars, cafe and 1590-1600 restaurant. I’m honoured to have taken over from Michael Boyd as the Artistic Henry VI Part 2 Director of this great Company and look forward to sharing our work with you Henry VI Part 3 The Two Gentlemen of Verona PLAYING over the coming years. I joined the RSC over 25 years ago, first as an actor, until W Titus Andronicus 26 OCTOBER then as Assistant Director and then Chief Associate, and if my appointment Henry VI Part 1 means anything, it represents a long term commitment to the disciplines and WILLIAM Richard III craftsmanship required to do the astonishing plays of William Shakespeare. SHAKESPEARE The Comedy of Errors But I also want to see Shakespeare in context – I want to celebrate not only Love’s Labour’s Lost his work, but the work of his contemporaries, and to invite some of the most A Midsummer Night’s Dream PLAYING exciting theatre-makers of our own day to work with us on new plays. I am 10 October – Richard II 16 noveMBER confident that my first season as Artistic Director marks the first steps King John towards realising those ambitions. From autumn 2013 through to early 2014 you will be able to enjoy Shakespeare, with my production of Richard II with Henry IV Part 1 David Tennant in the title role, alongside Ella Hickson‘s new play Henry IV Part 2 Wendy & Peter Pan, with its unique spin on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, and the stage Much Ado about Nothing PLAYING adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s critically-acclaimed novels, Wolf Hall and Henry V until 28 SEPTEMBER Bring Up the Bodies, by Mike Poulton. Please come back and join us this summer in the Royal Shakespeare and - Swan Theatres, where we have some of the UK’s most talented directors, 1600 1610 PLAYING designers, writers and artists bringing you Shakespeare, a Jacobean classic until Hamlet 28 SEPTEMBER never before performed at the RSC, and a world premiere by our Writer in The Merry Wives of Windsor Residence, Mark Ravenhill. Twelfth Night GREGORY DORAN Measure for Measure PLAYING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR 19 JULY – All’s Well that Ends Well 26 SEPTEMBER Timon of Athens Macbeth THE RSC IS GRATEFUL FOR THE SIGNIFICANT SUPPORT OF ITS PRINCIPAL FUNDER, ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND, WITHOUT WHICH OUR WORK WOULD NOT BE Pericles POSSIBLE. AROUND 50 PER CENT OF THE RSC’S INCOME IS SELF-GENERATED FROM BOX OFFICE SALES, SPONSORSHIP, DONATIONS, ENTERPRISE AND PARTNERSHIPS WITH OTHER ORGANISATIONS. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE THE RSC WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1961, BUT ITS HISTORY STRETCHES BACK TO 1879 WHEN THE FIRST PERMANENT THEATRE WAS BUILT IN STRATFORD ON THE after 1610 SITE OF THE CURRENT ROYAL SHAKESPEARE AND SWAN THEATRES. The Winter’s Tale THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY IS INCORPORATED UNDER ROYAL CHARTER AND IS A REGISTERED CHARITY, NUMBER 212481. The Tempest The RSC Ensemble is generously supported by The RSC Literary Department Henry VIII THE GATSBY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION and is generously supported by The Two Noble Kinsmen THE KOVNER FOUNDATION THE DRUE HEINZ TRUST Inset: Henry Peacham’s period illustration of Ancient a performance of Titus (c.1595) depicts actors in a mixture of contemporary Elizabethan costume and myths, Roman togas. modern times

Titus Andronicus: a mash-up of two thousand years of history? Jonathan Bate discusses the play’s historical timelessness and the relevance of its themes today

ver since the time of ancient Greek tragedy, western culture has been haunted by the figure of the revenger. Hee or she stands on a whole series of borderlines: between civilisation and barbarity, between an individual’s accountability to their own conscience and the community’s need for the rule of law, between the conflicting demands of justice and mercy. Do we have a right – a duty even – to exact revenge against those who have destroyed our loved ones? Or should we leave vengeance to the law or the gods? And if we do take action into our own hands, are we not reducing ourselves to the same moral level as the original perpetrator of murderous deeds? Bloody revenge, dismemberment, rape, feigned madness, cannibalism: this sounds like the sort of thing that can give theatre a bad name. But the violence in Titus is artistically purposeful - there is a harsh but elegant symmetry to the action. Alarbus’ limbs are lopped, and so then are Lavinia’s: since Tamora Queen of the Goths loses her son, Titus General of the Romans must lose his daughter. Shakespeare believed that ancient myths may speak to modern times. Titus Andronicus mingles mythology, history and invention. The story is patterned on the tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of Philomel, who is raped by her brother-in-law. He cuts out her tongue so that she cannot reveal his identity, but she finds another way of communicating, so enabling her sister to serve up a horrible revenge for dinner. Shakespeare took this mythic prototype and retold it through an invented narrative about a fictional Roman general, Titus Andronicus, who returns from successful wars against the Goths only to find himself at odds with the new emperor. Rome collapses into chaos from within. The play is set simultaneously in timeless myth, imperial Rome and Shakespeare’s own Europe. It should be read as a compendium of two thousand years of warfare and violence. A glorious mishmash of history and invention, Titus is not so much an historical work as a meditation on history. The political structures of the early Roman republic and the decadence of the late Roman empire are deliberately overlaid upon each other. They are also mingled with the preoccupations of late-Elizabethan England: the opening political dispute between Saturninus and Bassianus is over the question of the succession to the recently- deceased Emperor, a matter of considerable concern at the time Shakespeare was writing, when the old Virgin Queen was nearing the end of her life and there were several rival candidates to succeed her. We are asked to imagine that this could be any time in the Roman era and no time. The spiral of revenge begins with an act of human sacrifice, something that was never practiced in ancient Rome. But in their myths all cultures have foundational stories of sacrifice. For Shakespeare and his audience, Rome was evocative of the Roman Catholic church as well as the pagan empire of the past. So it is that the action is suffused with hints of that ultimate sacrifice, the crucifixion of God’s own Son – the word martyred is applied to Lavinia, and when she assists her father in the butchery of Chiron and Demetrius, she is asked to ‘receive the blood’, a phrase that darkly parodies the language of the Eucharist, in which we are redeemed by the symbolic blood of Christ. The play was enormously successful in its own time. It was the first of Shakespeare’s tragedies to be published, one of the works that made his name. But it became an embarrassment to later generations. When Titus Andronicus confronts the horrific fate of his children, his brother Marcus expects him to rant like an over-the-top actor. But Titus does not cry or curse. He laughs. Critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could not cope with such incongruity. Its affront to stylistic decorum was thought to be on a par with the play’s shocking lack of respect for the principle of poetic justice, in which the evil are punished and the good are duly rewarded. In our time, though, we have become sceptical about easy divisions between good and evil, black and white. We understand the play’s rapid dissolution of the opposition between insiders and outsiders, ‘civilised’ Romans and ‘barbaric’ Goths. And we also understand the juxtaposition of radically differing styles. Modern movies have made us familiar with characters like Aaron the Moor, who delivers a verbal pun one moment and a stab in the guts the next. Titus’ unexpected laugh helps us to comprehend the way in which human beings deal with inexpressible anguish, rather as Brian Keenan, one of the western hostages in the Lebanon, describes his discovery of the saving grace of humour: ‘in the most inhuman of circumstances men grow and deepen in humanity. In the face of death but not because of it, they explode with passionate life, conquering despair with insane humour.’ Whilst making us face the worst that we humans can do to each other and ourselves, Titus also offers us glimpses of the best. Like King Lear, Titus Andronicus journeys from authority to isolation; his wits begin to turn, but through humility he learns to love. There is even a strange tenderness to the way in which he finally puts his daughter out of her misery. Precisely because of all its extremities, Titus is the Shakespeare play for our extreme time, our post-millennial moment of dark memory and fresh hope.

Jonathan Bate is Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and a Governor of the RSC. He is currently writing a biography of Ted Hughes and is co-editor of the RSC edition Collaborative Plays by William Shakespeare and Others, due out later this year. n the cult 1973 Brit-horror film Theatre of Blood, a connoisseurs of violence Shakespearean actor – played by a splendidly cadaverous Vincent Price Andrew Dickson explores how the graphic i – decides to get revenge violence depicted in Titus Andronicus is as for a lifetime of bad reviews. One critic he drowns in a butt of wine, relevant in 2013 as it was in the early 1590s à la the hapless Clarence in Richard III; another has a pound of flesh surgically removed, in a morbid remake of The Merchant of Venice. One hack is beheaded in his sleep (Cymbeline). A rival is tricked into eating a pie baked from his poodles, a pastiche of the climax of Titus Andronicus. Knowingly preposterous as it is (and Theatre of Blood is nothing if not knowing), it’s hard not to feel that Douglas Hickox’s movie, scripted by Anthony Greville-Bell, is more on Titus’ wavelength than many of its grim-faced commentators. For much of its life, the play has been written off as grisly, barbaric, inexplicable, inexcusable: an adolescent blot on the otherwise faultless copybook of Shakespeare’s early career. Samuel Johnson doubted that it was even possible to stage it, suggesting that ‘the barbarity of the spectacles, and the general massacre… can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience’. His colleague, the editor George Steevens, found his eighteenth-century stomach rebelling at a play in which ‘Justice and Cookery …go hand in hand’. Steevens meant that as a fault, but what’s fascinating about Titus is how deliberately it forces us into what the psychologist Leon Festinger called in a groundbreaking 1957 study ‘cognitive dissonance’: the yawning sense that opposing worlds inhabit the same imaginative space. This is a drama that transgresses almost every boundary you can think of – between tragedy become connoisseurs of violence. and comedy, high art and low, lustrous Role-playing videogames such as rhetorical ornament and brute, bloody the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor reality. There is something almost series are now huge business globally, manic in Shakespeare’s determination inviting participants to hone their to see what he can get away with, skills in worlds as vividly imagined whether it’s requiring his hero to and thrillingly dangerous as anything have his hand cut off in full view (as in Elizabethan drama. And in film, of challenging to perform then as it course, these tropes are older still, is now) or bringing a copy of Ovid’s extending back beyond the era of The Metamorphoses on stage to help solve Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920) and an attack on his daughter, Lavinia. It’s Nosferatu (1922). Horror is, indeed, almost certainly the only Elizabethan nowadays the most post-postmodern tragedy to devote a scene to the of movie genres – as the ongoing philosophical implications of killing a Scream franchise, and the recent fad fly. for remakes (Carrie, Friday the 13th, Yet, like many of Shakespeare’s Nightmare on Elm Street) demonstrate. plays, Titus filters with iridescent To date there has been only one particularity the society its creator full-scale feature film adaptation inhabited. Poverty-stricken and of Titus Andronicus, Julie Taymor’s pestilential, exhilarating and addictive, of 1999, which explicitly linked the Elizabethan London was a place of world of violence-on-demand with extremes: of gentlefolk in silken the violence of Shakespeare’s script, finery attending public executions beginning with a prologue in which as enthusiastically as plays, in a boy playing wargames at home is which even the most high-flown love abruptly sucked into the drama. But speech at the Rose or Globe could if you were searching for films as be undercut by the wauling of bears forensically self-aware as Titus, you’d from the baiting gardens nearby. Little have to look to the early work of the surprise that audiences loved blood- Coen brothers (perhaps Blood Simple and-thunder revenge dramas, most and Fargo) and, even more, to Quentin especially Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tarantino, who has likewise often been Tragedy (c.1587), whose wisecracking accused of gratuitous, desensitising mixture of sex, murder and insanity violence. To my mind it’s more prefigures not only Titus but Hamlet. interesting than that, as witnessed by Although Titus is usually dated to a famous scene in 1992’s Reservoir c.1592, making the playwright close Dogs, in which a gangster played by to 30 when he finished it, there’s Michael Madsen binds a police officer surely some schoolboy revenge at to a chair and coolly slices off his ear. work in this flamboyant demonstration It’s not the bloodshed that makes the of the gory uses to which classical act appalling (though that’s appalling education (Seneca, Ovid) could be put. enough); it’s the gangster tuning his And in Shakespeare’s Moor Aaron, radio beforehand to Gerry Rafferty’s an outsider anti-hero who seethes perky pop classic Stuck in the Middle with the same volatile energy as with You, which plays as surreal Tamburlaine and the Jew of Malta, accompaniment throughout. ‘Was that there’s surely a tribute to his great as good for you as it was for me?’ the rival Christopher Marlowe. gangster asks the ear afterwards, Our own society has struggled with holding it up to his mouth. The radio the scene a few moments later, when As in Tarantino, there is a kind of Titus. When Peter Brook staged the jangles on. Titus’s brother Marcus encounters morality in this extremity – by daring play at Stratford in 1955, only the Horrendous or hilarious? Perhaps his maimed niece and, instead of us to take it all as a joke, Shakespeare second time the unadapted text had both, and in that there are shades of being stunned into silence, delivers forces us to look hard at what we’re been done in Britain for nearly three Shakespeare’s play. After their coldly perhaps the play’s most dissonant, really seeing, and thereby at ourselves. centuries, it was in a stylised, almost plotted double rape and mutilation stomach-churning speech – a long set ‘Why dost thou laugh?’, Marcus asks operatic production, as if to limit the of Lavinia, Chiron and Demetrius piece, mellifluous with Ovid, in which Titus. ‘Why,’ Titus replies. ‘I have not risk of it going off accidentally and can’t resist making the whole thing he compares her hands to ‘sweet another tear to shed.’ injuring the audience. Recent directors into a childish gag (‘Go home,’ coos ornaments’, her ‘rosèd lips’, soaked in have been bolder, perhaps sensing Chiron, ‘call for sweet water, wash thy blood, to a ‘bubbling fountain stirred Andrew Dickson is the Guardian’s that we, like the Elizabethans, have hands.’). And we might also think of with wind’. theatre editor. His Rough Guide to Shakespeare is published by Penguin. ‘If there were reason for these miseries, Then into limits could I bind my woes: When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow?’ (Act 3, scene 1) Making a splash: Peter Kirwan on how the youthful vigour of Shakespeare’s Titus and excessive youth early play characterises the age of the writer, as well as defining interpretations on stage and screen

e that will swear a contract with the audience for their talking about Titus more than two ’27 Club’, the group of musicians who Jeronimo or Andronicus proper appreciation, referring as he decades after it first emerged. died young after an early peak: Jimi are the best plays yet, does to two of the most famous plays While chronology is always Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, of the earlier Elizabethan period, debatable, most critics agree that the Amy Winehouse and countless others. shall pass unexcepted at Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy version of Titus Andronicus we currently Entrants to the modern Club have been here as a man whose (starring the character Hieronimo/ possess was written c.1591-2, very characterised not only by their 'judgementh shows it is constant, and hath Jeronimo) and William Shakespeare early in Shakespeare’s career. Peele premature deaths but by their artistic stood still these five and twenty or thirty and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus. (who may have written an earlier and personal engagement with drugs, While Jonson’s purpose is to mock the version of the play that Shakespeare alcohol, sex or violence, ensuring that years.’ taste of those who still consider the revised) was around 35, and notoriety becomes part of their myth. At the start of Ben Jonson’s earlier revenge plays to be the finest Shakespeare himself about 27, an age As with the work of the ‘27 Club’, Bartholomew Fair, first performed in plays ever written, the point only now unfortunately associated with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus 1614, a scrivener emerges and makes makes sense if people were still prodigious artistic talent through the burned brightly long after its moment. The play’s occasional (and over-easy) rape Lavinia: ‘There speak and strike, dismissal as juvenilia has been tied in brave boys, and take your turns’. with its graphic content. Severed limbs, The ability of Aaron to govern and rapid-fire murders, garish disguises direct the excesses of the immature and the final horror of the pies – is it brothers is key to the success of his any wonder that the play was still plots. remembered by Jonson’s audiences a It may not be coincidence that young quarter-century later? directors taking their own turns at The sensationalism is frequently seen the RSC are drawn to the play. The as part of the play’s immaturity, the 26 year-old Buzz Goodbody cut her work of a young man who has not yet RSC teeth on the play under Trevor learned to temper his impulses, Nunn, just three years before her emphasised in John Madden’s film own tragically premature death, and Shakespeare in Love, where the play’s the most acclaimed production of only fan is the child John Webster. the twentieth century was Deborah Alexandra Shepard, in Meanings of Warner’s RSC debut at the Swan – Manhood in Early Modern England (2003) press night was, coincidentally, her demonstrates that the display of 28th birthday. In 2013, actors as excess was an important part of youth young as 19 and 20 play the ‘brave culture in the early modern period. boys’ in a production that invites us to This is apparent in the period’s see a Rome peopled by an unusually obsession with the Biblical narrative of young company – fitting, for a play the Prodigal Son, as in the broadside that forces an older generation to ballad ‘The Prodigal Son Converted’: confront the destruction of its children through rape, murder, mutilation and From fifteen till thirty, cannibalism. just halfe of my time, Perhaps there is something I have lived in excess, significant in the desire of youth to and have thought it no crime. retell this story itself. In the acclaimed Conspicuous consumption, profligate films of Titus by Jane Howell (1985) spending and a reckless abandon and Julie Taymor (1999), both directors to the present with no care for the chose to show the action from the future characterised the period’s perspective of Young Lucius, the one conception of youth, and provided youthful survivor of the play. Carol grist for moralists. For writers of city Rutter, in Shakespeare and Child’s Play comedy, such as Thomas Middleton in (2007) argues that from this inverted A Mad World, My Masters, the prodigal perspective, Rome looks very different. narrative found humour in The RSC’s strong track record of inter-generational conflict. For privileging young talent — from writers of tragedy, it often led to Goodbody and Warner, to the young grimmer conclusions as ‘crime’ invited writers trialling new plays, even to the retribution. appointment of a 28-year old Trevor But of course, in the Biblical Nunn to run the company in 1968 – story of the Prodigal Son, no-one balances the weight of experience remembers the obedient elder son and tradition with the energy of who works diligently on his father’s youth, creating exciting potential for land; youthful excess has a theatrical innovation and rediscovery. It is in this brio that is frequently compelling. balance that burning out becomes While a character such as Claudio in burning brightly, and the excess Measure for Measure may lament that and destruction of Titus becomes an ‘Our natures do pursue, / Like rats enduring legacy, as for Shakespeare that ravin down their proper bane, himself. / A thirsty evil’, it is the abandon of youth that makes these figures so Peter Kirwan is Lecturer in entertaining, but also so dangerous. Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Nottingham, and Chiron and Demetrius in Titus are Associate Editor on the forthcoming characterised by their youth at the RSC edition of Collaborative Plays crucial point of Aaron’s instruction to by William Shakespeare and Others.

THE PLAY IN REHEARSAL

Approximate performance time NURSE Fights by CAST badria timimi KATE WATERS romans HANDMAID Illusions by SATURNINUS ellie beaven richard pinner x 10 the deceased HOURS MINUTES Emperor’s son, MESSENGER Company Text and later Emperor ben deery Voice Work by Including an interval of 20 minutes john hopkins STEPHEN KEMBLE CONCUBINES BASSIANUS ellie beaven Assistant Director his brother MEL HILLYARD richard goulding sarah ridgeway WILLIAM Music Director SHAKESPEARE TITUS goths JOHN WOOLF ANDRONICUS TAMORA Casting by a noble general Queen of the stephen boxer Goths, later HANNAH MILLER CDG Empress of Rome LAVINiA Children's his daughter katy stephens Casting Director rose reynolds ALARBUS Barbara roberts CDG LUCIUS her son Production Manager his son nicholas prasad PETE GRIFFIN THE PLAY matthew needham DEMETRIUS Costume Supervisor her son QUINTUS SABINE LEMAÎTRe The brothers his son perry millward Saturninus and Tamora persuades Saturninus joe bannister Company Manager Bassianus are in contention not to exile Titus. her sons, CHIRON michael dembowicz MARTIUS her son for the Roman Emperorship. Chiron and Demetrius, are his son jonny weldon Stage Manager Titus Andronicus, Rome's most convinced to avenge their ROBBIE CULLEN ciarÁn owens AARON honoured general, returns mother by raping and mutilating MUTIUS a moor, Deputy Stage victorious from wars against the Lavinia, and killing Bassianus. Manager his son Tamora’s lover Goths with their Queen, Tamora, Aaron falsely implicates two kevin harvey GABRIELLE SANDERS harry mcentire her sons and her lover Aaron as Assistant Stage of Titus' sons in the murder. MARCUS GOTH QUEEN captives. Tamora’s eldest son is Titus cuts off his own arm and his brother, sarah ridgeway Manager Tribune of the THOMAS GILDING sacrificed by Titus and she vows presents it to Saturninus in an people GOTH WARRIOR revenge. attempt to save his sons but richard durden ciarÁn owens MUSICIANS Titus is nominated Emperor receives only their heads in YOUNG LUCIUS ALL OTHER PARTS Live music by his brother Marcus, one of return. Vowing revenge, Titus son of Lucius PLAYED BY MEMBERS played by george david/ OF THE COMPANY Rome's Tribunes. Titus declines, sends his surviving son, Lucius, Violin/Voice instead nominating Saturninus. hal hewetson CATHERINE FOX to the Goths to raise an army. CREATIVE TEAM To seal the bond of friendship, Titus achieves his vengeance PUBLIUS cello Directed by the new Emperor offers to son of Marcus BEN STEVENS by killing Tamora's sons and Andronicus MICHAEL FENTIMAN marry Titus' daughter Lavinia. serving them up to her at ben deery Guitar/Oud/Bouzouki She however, is already pledged Designed by GORDON DUNN a banquet, and then killing SEMPRONIUS to Bassianus. Saturninus, by Titus’ kinsman COLIN RICHMOND her. He himself is killed by Trumpet now infatuated by Tamora, nicholas prasad Lighting Designed ANDREW Saturninus and his death is by makes her Empress. Motivated avenged by Lucius, who is made CAIUS STONE-FEWINGS Titus’ kinsman CHRIS DAVEY by her desire for revenge, Emperor. Trombone david rubin Music and sound by KEVIN PITT AEMILIUS TOM MILLS Percussion gwilym lloyd JAMES JONES CLOWN Movement by ANN YEE keyboards dwane walcott JOHN WOOLF

Production Acknowledgements Additional Company Movement: RSC Movement Smith. Captioning by Ridanne Sheridan. Photography is not permitted during the performance. Mobile Scenery, set painting, properties, costumes, armoury,wigs Department. Production photographer: Simon The first performance of this production took place phones and watch alarms should be turned off or deposited in the and make-up by RSC Workshops, Stratford-upon-Avon. Annand. With thanks to Dave Newbold and on 16 May 2013 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. cloakroom. Please remember, too, that coughing, whispering and Additional costumes by Emma Jealouse. Costume prosthetics Dick Powell of the Metropolitan Police. Audio The use of video cameras and any other recording fanning programmes spoils the performance for other members and Headdresses by Robert Allsopp, Leigh Cranston. description by Ridanne Sheridan and Carolyn equipment in the theatre is strictly forbidden. of the audience and can also be distracting to the actors.