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Market Theatre of Johannesburg, South Africa, 1995 – Dir. Gregory Doran One of Britain’s most celebrated Shakespearean actors, Antony Sher, was born in South Africa but left home at the age of 18 to pursue his career in the United Kingdom. During the 1980s, Sher conspicuously supported the UN’s cultural boycott of his homeland, but with the lifting of sanctions in the early 1990s, he and his partner and collaborator, director Gregory Doran, under the auspices of the National Theatre Studio, agreed
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 It begins with Edward Ravenscroft's version that superseded Shakespeare's script.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.
The point of departure of John Drakakis’ investigation of notions of death and decay is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Drakakis takes the use of a real skull in Gregory Doran’s RSC production of the play (2008) as the starting-point for a discussion of the implications of rereading the Renaissance through the history of the Gothic in terms of the current obsession with notions of death, material and virtual reality. Drawing on a wide variety of Renaissance writers including Donne, Webster and Middleton as well as on Gothic novelists such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Isabella Kelly, he discusses possible connections and their legitimacy in connection to theoretical approaches from Freud to Bataille and Derrida.
Stein (Rome’s Teatro Ateneo, 1989–90), Silviu Purcarete (Theatre National de Craiova, Romania, 1993–97), Gregory Doran (Market Theatre, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1995 ), and Richard Rose (Stratford, Ontario, 2000 ). However, the best known ‘political’ rendition of Titus Andronicus is the stage production directed in 1994 by Julie Taymor, for New York’s Theatre for a New Audience, and later made into the feature film Titus (1999). Taymor’s version of the play not only stressed a modern preoccupation with
to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, such as Seneca’s Troades and Jasper Heywood’s translation of the play, I shall also be referring to some directorial choices of Deborah Warner, Josie Rourke, David Giles, Gregory Doran and Laurent Pelly, since stagings are apt to generate a liberating energy that taps back into the dramatist’s original process of creation and illuminates the text. Albeit that
’s assumed priority in the collaborative composition of Titus , which affects not only the editorial choices made in scholarly editions, but also the staging decisions made in theatrical productions based on such editions. To explore this issue, I will concentrate on the productions of three recent directors (Gregory Doran, Julie Taymor, and Bill Alexander) who made strong performance choices regarding Mutius, all influenced to some degree by claims about the composition of the play in editions or other criticism that they
use in a theatrical performance’. 5 That future, it seems, has arrived. While mo-cap remains costly and counterintuitive, major breakthroughs have been made in the use of motion-capture puppets on stage, allowing digital creatures to ‘transcend their intangibility’ 6 and evolve into a genre-defying hybrid form. In late 2016, the latest in real-time motion capture was placed on spectacular display in Gregory Doran's production of
. 26 Faye Claridge, ‘New RSC production stuns with no death count’, BBC Coventry and Warwickshire website www.bbc.co.uk/coventry/stage/stories/2002/07/island-princess-review.shtml (accessed on 14 October 2008 ). 27 Antony Sher and Gregory Doran, Woza
The decade 1989–99 witnessed the resurgence of Titus as a political tract, with three major European directors (Peter Stein, Silviu Purcarete, and Gregory Doran) focusing their attention on the ways in which the play can be made to comment on specific contemporary affairs. Their productions (consciously or not) therefore duplicated the approach adopted in 1967 by Douglas Seale, the first director to employ modern dress to draw ‘parallels between the violence and wholesale murder of our times and the time
. While much of Gregory Doran’s 2012 production used a visual dimension which invoked association with sub-Saharan Africa (including echoes of Yael Farber’s SeZaR in details like the necklacing of Cinna the Poet), the events of the previous year’s Arab Spring suggested other topical resonances. The toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt set the stage for a production which was