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During the years immediately following Deborah Warner’s acclaimed 1987 RSC production, succeeding directors of Titus Andronicus declined to follow her example of playing an uncut script and making the most of the text’s opportunities for dark comedy. Three of the four productions that opened in 1989 (directed by Jeannette Lambermont, Daniel Mesguich, and Michael Maggio) cut and rearranged the text liberally, often in an attempt to avoid the laughter that Warner had welcomed. Emulating a more distant
To look at the performance history of Titus Andronicus is to confront some provocative questions such as why has this play posed severe problems for generations of readers, critics, editors, actors, directors, and playgoers. The book examines twelve major theatrical productions and one film, on the play, that appeared in the years 1989-2009. It begins with Edward Ravenscroft's version that superseded Shakespeare's script. Peter Brook chose to stylise or formalise many moments, and Deborah Warner's production worked with no cutting of the script. Every staging of Titus elicits comments about the daunting nature of the script. The book presents Irving Wardle's reactions on Trevor Nunn's 1972 rendition, and Stanley Wells's review of the Swan production. The densest concentration of such problems and anomalies, as perceived by today's directors, critics, and editors, comes in the final scene. The productions that opened in 1989, directed by Jeannette Lambermont, Daniel Mesguich, and Michael Maggio, cut and rearranged the text liberally, often in an attempt to avoid the laughter. During the period 1989-99, three major European directors, Peter Stein, Silviu Purcarete, and Gregory Doran, focused their attention on the ways in which the play can be made to comment on specific contemporary affairs. Julie Taymor's venture in 1994 combined stylization with the 'visceral reality' as a means to keep spectators off balance and continuously sensitive to the shocking brutality of the play's events. The book ends by discussing the efforts of Yukio Ninagaw, Bill Alexander, Gale Edwards, Richard Rose, and Lucy Bailey.
) 7 Alain Robbe-Grillet with Jean-Louis Trintignant during the shooting of Le Jeu avec le feu (1974) 8 Alain Robbe-Grillet directing Gabrielle Lazure and Daniel Mesguich in La Belle captive (1983) 9
that Brook gained his distinctive effects, which influenced succeeding performances, by making two key decisions: to cut the script heavily and to stylise the play’s violence within a ritualistic framework (see p. 25 ). I would add that this stylisation drew upon techniques from Asian theatre, which reappear as Japanese elements in two of the three productions stemming from Brook’s example: Jeannette Lambermont’s 1989 Stratford, Ontario version, Daniel Mesguich’s production at the Theatre de l’Athénée in the same year
itself, thus being doubly spectacular. Relying on the semantic field of theatricality that develops in Shakespeare's text with each apparition of Hamlet's late father, director Daniel Mesguich coined a portmanteau word, ‘spectracle’, to define the spectre-as-spectacle. 41 In a similar vein, the first version of Jean-Louis Curtis's French translation of Macbeth for Vilar insisted on Banquo's ghost as illusion rather than delusion or error in perception, although the final version chose the second option
-Gavras's oblique solution to the problem of representing the economy. Le capital and representation When Jack Marmande (Daniel Mesguich), CEO of Phenix Bank, collapses on the golf course because of complications arising from his untreated testicular cancer, he nominates Marc Tourneuil (Gad Elmaleh) as his successor, fully intending to keep running the venerable French financial institution himself, albeit from behind the scenes. His rivals on the board, headed by Antoine De Suze (Bernard Le Coq), agree, reasoning that even with treatment Marmande will only live