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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 It begins with Edward Ravenscroft's version that superseded Shakespeare's script.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.
; still mostly confined to the educated, left-liberal middle class. Open Space and Almost Free performed theatre in London's derelict buildings. The most radical lunchtime theatre, the Soho Poly Theatre, moved to a minute cellar with a pillar-box red interior in Riding House Street behind BBC Broadcasting House in 1971. The theatre's low-ceilinged basement, redolent with the aroma of homemade soup, fresh chicken liver pâté and coffee, was often filled to its 48-person capacity, which included the major drama critics: the Guardian 's Michael Billington and Irving Wardle
emotional relationships are determined by money and class as much as by our hearts’. Billington identified lightly that, ‘like all good writers’, the playwright has ‘fashioned his own style of dialogue. Crystal Palace baroque … or South London rococo: short sentences, non-sequiturs and sharp aphorisms.’ 148 Writing in The Times , Irving Wardle's observation that ‘it is a salutary shock to see a Pakistani character elevated from cornershop subservience into the moneyed arrogance of an old
linear narrative has been seen as the source of the play’s effectiveness from the time of the first production. On 29 August 1937, for example, in his Observer review, Ivor Brown described the second act as ‘dramatically brilliant’. Reviewing a production of the play at Manchester’s Royal Exchange in 1973, Irving Wardle praised the play’s 20 Playing for time ‘immensely accomplished’ structure (The Times, 29.12.73). In 2001, Jeremy Kingston wrote of the current Royal Exchange production, ‘the third act takes us to the ominous end of [Kay’s] birthday party. But we
’ treatment placed above the credits (so to speak) as an over-determining prologue (Benedict Nightingale, New Statesman , 21 April 1972). They'd always been dubious about its reference to the actual play scripted by Shakespeare. Irving Wardle, for one, noted that the plebs who appear in Shakespeare's ‘own first scene’ wouldn't stand for a moment the contemptuous kicking delivered by Cominius et al. , being ‘anything but cowed by their betters’ ( The Times , 12 April 1972). And what was to be understood, given the aftermath of Shakespeare's opening scene, by Brutus
male energy, sexual strength’ and boredom. 102 Looking for trouble on the night of the assault, the boys ‘wanted sensation’ ( OAOP 65). Writing in The Times , Irving Wardle admired Outskirts : ‘as a British-born Pakistani [now no longer an ‘Anglo-Pakistani’, although his English mother is erased] who writes with some sympathy about the white urban working class, Hanif Kureishi is an inexpressibly welcome figure on the racial scene.’ This warm review stemmed in part from the play's compassionate
entertainment, with excessive telling above showing. She saw it weakened by Joe and Imran's ‘improbable’ relationship. 80 In a lengthy, detailed review, Irving Wardle admired the early scenes as ‘rich in bitter ironies’ and the ‘alert’ dialogue as full of surprises, but similarly argued that while the young playwright had proved his quality in The King and Me , ‘“The Mother Country” falls into the category of “something the author had to write”. The play's treatment of cultural collision suffers from the airlessness and lack
’. ‘Wrestling’ as she mocks him with hearing the ambassadors, ‘Antony turns Cleo over and now kneels astride her. The “court” enjoys all the horseplay, encircling and encouraging. The Romans s[tage] r[ight] look on disdainfully’, stunned into silence by the ‘paroxysms of lascivious giggles’ they're hearing (Irving Wardle, The Times , 11 April 1987). Then, the messengers’ attempts to interrupt cut off by ‘Speak not to us’ (1.1.56) ‘the entire court’ exit ‘swiftly u[p]/s[tage] doors’. Left alone, the two Romans ‘exit separate ways’. The management of this
Anderson had previous experience in creating a monumental, worthy victim of calamity from directing Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers at the Royal Court Theatre in December 1961. Irving Wardle summarised thus the absurdist Brechtian drama: The ironically named hero, Biedermann (‘honest man’) is a well-to-do suburbanite who has made a fortune out of hair oil by
difficulty walking upright (unlike Vivien Leigh’s elegant entrance in a white gown in 1955). In the terms of a less than sympathetic Jeremy Kingston ( Punch , 25 October 1972), Nunn played ‘all this beastliness for naturalism’, but a more appreciative Irving Wardle found that the director, for the most part, had succeeded in staging the play’s horrors ‘without relapsing into monotony or unintended farce’ by having Titus hit ‘as if with hammer blows’ by the events ( The Times , 13 October 1972). Some of Nunn’s most