Unhappy families

Titus Andronicus, A Month in the Country, Let The Right One In.

The New Criterion, March 1, 2015

Titus Andronicus

Seeing Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great in December had left me with an unsavory craving for Elizabethan gore. Ross Williams’s take on Titus Andronicus for the New York Shakespeare Exchange at SoHo’s HERE Arts Center looked like an ideal excuse to return to the abattoir. Tamburlaine boasted the cutting out of a tongue, parents killing their children, virgins impaled on spears, kings bridled and yoked to a chariot, a king in a cage, two suicides in cages, and metronomic massacre. Titus Andronicus promised another severed tongue, three chopped-off hands, a father killing two of his children, a mother eating two of hers, human sacrifice, a man sentenced to death by starvation, and, yes, metronomic massacre. With luck, an entertaining Friday night lay ahead. My hopes were heightened by the program notes. There were both a “fight choreographer” and someone responsible for “violence design.” Talk of a clown was less welcome. The plot is straightforward enough. Titus (a stolid performance by Brendan Averett), a veteran general, returns to Rome after a victorious war with the Goths. The Goth queen, Tamora (Gretchen Egolf), and three of her sons are amongst his captives. Ignoring Tamora’s pleas, Titus sacrifices the oldest in honor of his own fallen soldier-sons, setting off the cycle of revenge that consumes the rest of the play and, all too literally, some of its characters.

Offered the then-vacant post of emperor, Titus declines the job and hands it to the last emperor’s elder son, the weak but nasty Saturninus (nicely played by Vince Gatton, his high camp villainy flagged by a quiff and a tacky fur-collared coat). The new emperor promptly tries to marry Titus’s beloved daughter Lavinia, who is already betrothed to his younger brother, Bassianus. Rebuffed, Saturninus takes Tamora instead. She is now in a position to get back at Titus. Her lover, Aaron, a splendidly wicked Moor (well-played by Warren Jackson), convinces Tamora’s sons, a wolf-pack of two (given a touch of twenty-first-century Goth flair with raccoon-stripe make-up), that butchering Bassianus will give them the opportunity to rape Lavinia. Aaron frames two of Titus’s remaining sons for the murder. They are executed. Of course they are.

The ponderous Titus belatedly launches a counter-attack that ends with a last supper more deadly than Hamlet’s last act. Among the guests is Tamora, who dines most “daintily” on pies into which, unknown to her, her sons have been baked.

Titus Andronicus has long been the crazy uncle (or crazy nephew: it was one of Shakespeare’s earliest works) in the canon, an embarrassment so embarrassing that there was an effort—sustained over the centuries—to deny that Shakespeare had written it. There’s an echo of that embarrassment in two of the three versions of the play that I have seen; this one and the darkly sparkling and suitably hyperbolic film version directed by Julie Taymor.

Both put the play within a frame. Taymor’s movie begins with a child playing war games in a mid–twentieth-century kitchen. The house comes under bombardment, and the boy is hurried to safety through a tunnel that opens up into the Colosseum. The play then starts. Towards the end of the film, the camera pulls back, shifting the location of Titus’s final dinner party as it does so, from his dining room back into that amphitheater, a reminder that we are an audience and always have been.

The proceedings at HERE begin with the cast milling around. The milling turns to killing, a war of all against all in which everyone seemed to be killed more than once. I’m guessing there was a message there. Only once that danse macabre ends does the play proper begin. Even then the dressing table by the side of the stage signals that this is a performance. And that is the table at which the clown (Kerry Kastin) often sits.

Outside of the circus, where they are merely an irritation, and, perhaps, Samuel Beckett, clowns are almost always figures of fear or symbols of pretension, but in the Shakespeare Exchange’s defense the original Titus Andronicus does indeed feature a clown (I had forgotten about that). He is persuaded by Titus to deliver an (insulting) letter to Saturninus. This play being what it is, the messenger is shot—well, hanged.

Ms. Kastin’s clown is on stage far longer. It is only when she slips into other roles, such as that of the nurse who sees too much, that she begins being killed off. Those deaths aside, she spends most of the evening as a sad-eyed spectator of mayhem, a reminder yet again that this is a performance, a point that the play’s staging is clearly designed to reinforce. The set is dominated by a giant target studded with light-bulbs that light up during some of the uglier moments, no small task. Tent-like canvas sheets walling off the back and sides of the stage and bursts of carnival music hint at grubby carnie spectacle and with it a degree not only of distance, but also of disdain for what is taking place on stage: this murder, this cruelty: this is not what we do.

So the audience laughed at, not with, the lethal brawl that brings that cannibal feast to its dreadful end, encouraged, probably, by some ham on stage alongside those sinister pies. And there were guffaws during the bizarre sequence in which Titus, his brother, and one of Titus’s sons all volunteer to give up a hand in exchange for the lives of Titus’s other two surviving sons, then awaiting their execution. While the others go off to decide who shall hand over a hand, Titus has his hand hacked off by the evil Moor, the man who had proposed the handover in the first place. But Titus, surprisingly trusting given that this is now the third act of a play in which almost everyone behaves badly, has allowed himself to be swindled. He is handed the heads of his two sons (bundled in red-sodden sacks) in return for his hand. In a final slap, he is then handed his hand back. He exits carrying one head, his brother the other. They are accompanied by Lavinia, who has lost both her hands and her tongue to the two Goth rapists. Her father asks her to make herself useful nonetheless and carry his severed hand “between thy teeth.” She does. The sight of this grim little procession brought laughs from some in the audience and must have made some others, not for the first time that night, wonder what Shakespeare was playing at. Perhaps I should say at this point that hands are mentioned some sixty times in the play’s script.

In his biography of Shakespeare, Peter Ackroyd dismisses the idea that Titus Andronicus is a parody: “The revenge tragedy was still too novel and exciting a form to be ridiculed in that self-reflecting manner.” The savagery on stage was too close to Tudor reality not to be taken seriously, and so close to Tudor reality that the dial had to be turned up to eleven—dark word games and all— to shock. The play was a hit for decades, which also suggests that it was seen as something more than a joke. It’s more interesting to ask why modern audiences react to this play in the way that they do. It cannot be a coincidence that, after centuries of neglect, Titus Andronicus has slouched back into view, a rough beast reborn in an era when barbarism has returned to the gardens of the west, its return to some sort of prominence, if not exactly respectability, heralded by a landmark Peter Brook production in 1955, a decade after Auschwitz. But we still try to push away its implications by clever framing and ironic knowing laughter: this could never be us. Really?

In an age in which Ed Wood is an icon, there’s no doubt that some of the current interest in Titus Andronicus comes from its reputation as an artistic disaster, an opportunity for rubber-necking fun made all the more delightful by the fact that Shakespeare was at the helm. But to describe Titus as a failure is to let squeamishness get in the way of judgment. One of the strengths of this production is the way that it allows the strengths of this nightmarish, clever play (one of the few, surely, to use Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a prop) to emerge. There is the language, well on the way to glory, but there is also an unflinching, and strikingly modern, depiction of an amoral and cruel society. Rome is “a wilderness of Tigers.” None of the main characters are truly sympathetic, and the most intriguing of the lot is the Moor, consciously alien, chillingly unrepentant.

Looking at plays, such as Edmund Ironside, in which Shakespeare may plausibly have been involved, Ackroyd experiences “the strangest moments of recognition . . . as if the shadow of Shakespeare had passed over the page.” With Titus Andronicus there’s something not so dissimilar, the traces, unexpectedly moving, of all his tomorrows, of characters slowly emerging from the marble, as Michelangelo might have put it, some Iago in Aaron, some Lady Macbeth in Tamora, channeled (I thought) by Ms. Egolf as she acts out Tamora’s dream of revenge.

The second half of that famous Tolstoy line tells us “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Andronici had to deal with murder, rape and some very dangerous enemies. In A Month in the Country, the Islayevs have it much, much easier. Nevertheless, the arrival of a handsome young tutor shatters the precarious boredom that has up until then been the defining characteristic of their household in an estate somewhere too far from Moscow in mid–nineteenth-century Russia.

A Month in The Country

In the Classic Stage Company’s deft, if undemanding, version of Turgenev’s most successful play, Taylor Schilling (best known to most as Piper Chapman in Orange Is the New Black, but to the three of us who watched Atlas Shrugged, Part I, a gorgeous Dagny Taggart) conveys that boredom and its precariousness very well indeed. Beautiful and capricious (her mood changes seemingly paralleled by the shifting colors of the dresses she wears), her Natalya is no longer so enthused by her husband, a benign figure benignly played by Anthony Edwards, late of ER. Instead she toys with Rakitin (Peter Dinklage). He’s a familiar type in Russian drama, the perpetually hovering, perpetually disappointed, perpetually hopeful suitor. This was a role that Turgenev himself played for decades with the no-less-married mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia, a role that was, he later confided (admittedly to a young actress he was trying to impress), the inspiration for Rakitin.

Dinklage, a fine actor, and, as Tyrion Lannister, the “Halfman” who has made The Game of Thrones his own, is dark and handsome, but two out of three is not always a passing grade. His lack of inches, accentuated by the contrast with the willowy Schilling, somehow adds further pathos to his thralldom to a woman who rather enjoys never quite saying yes. Dinklage convincingly depicts Rakitin’s sadness and resignation, which curdles into bitterness as he discovers that Natalya has fallen for the young tutor (a disappointingly bland Mike Faist), as, adding to the gathering storm, has her ward Vera (Megan West, overdoing the ingénue thing). This being a Russian play, matters do not end happily, despite some enjoyable comic interludes. This not being Titus Andronicus, no one is killed, but the script itself may have been subject to some mutilation. The pace is brisk, perhaps too brisk, romcom brisk. The translation by John Christopher Jones is lighter and brighter than the statelier Constance Garnett version, but has its infelicities: Vera’s cheery “hey” is more Valley than Volga. Above all, some of Turgenev’s underlying themes are difficult to discern, not least some of the broader tensions below the deceptive timelessness of provincial Russia, too briefly glimpsed in some acerbic comments from Dr. Shpigelsky (an excellent Thomas Jay Ryan), a man uncertainly placed in the class divide who knows a dead end when he sees it.

Let The Right One In

If the birch trees that line the back of the stage for much of A Month in the Country are used to build up an impression of northern summer, those featuring in the production of Let the Right One In at Dumbo’s St. Ann’s Warehouse contribute to a sense of the deep darkness of the long Nordic winter. There is snow on the boards, a utilitarian lamp post a long way from Narnia, and a jungle gym, that perennial enabler of organized fun. We are on a housing estate in Sweden in the early 1980s, albeit one with a distinctly tartan twist: this is a production by the National Theatre of Scotland, with accents to match, which means that the production lacks the distinctive Swedishness that was so important both to the original movie and the book, that notion of bleached orderliness, of a suburb with no plan for a soul, of a place where no wild things should lurk.

Let the Right One In is essentially a theatrical remake of Låt den rätte komma in (2008), the glum and disturbing Swedish horror movie that was far better than the sprawling and chaotic book by John Ajvide Lindqvist on which it was based, and which was also made into an American movie (Let Me In, 2010) that, unlike many U.S. remakes of intelligent European cinema, did not disgrace itself.

The story revolves around Oskar (in his early to mid-teens in the play, twelve or so in the book and the films). He’s eking out an existence in what remains of his family. He’s an only child, being brought up by a mother who drinks too much. He misses his dad, who seems to have decided that women are not for him and has moved elsewhere. He’s badly bullied at high school. The only bright spot in this bleak existence is his burgeoning relationship with Eli (Rebecca Benson), the grubby, sometimes disconcertingly smelly, girl next door. Only she turns out not to be a girl (it’s complicated; the book goes into more detail), nor particularly human. It emerges that she lives on blood, but is not, she claims, that. . . .

But she is.

The message is that love will overcome just about everything, gender, species, bullies, a broken family, but a romantic ending (the two run off together) leaves open some awkward questions that the play never attempts to address. The besotted Oskar (Cristian Ortega, good enough but no more than that) has signed up to be a murderous Renfield, expected to find blood for a Dracula forever on the edge of adolescence. He will age, Eli will not, meaning that Oskar has—what exactly to look forward to? It’s hard not to think that he too is one of Eli’s victims, vulnerable, lonely, but seduced rather than supped upon.

The production itself is highly theatrical, at times too much so: Some elaborately choreographed scenes, more than a little reminiscent of the same company’s Black Watch, detract from a story that might be more suited to a format closer to that of a chamber piece. That said, the play’s look and its sound (music by Ólafur Arnalds) conveys a sense of the monstrous enchantment seeping into that mundane suburban space, and there is one moment that, well, what’s the term¬—coup de théâtre, that’s it.

And as Eli, Ms. Benson is simply remarkable, unearthly, unsettling, naive, knowing, feral, vulnerable—and dangerous in more ways than one.