Review

Fintan O'Toole reviews Titus Andronicus at the Project in Dublin.

Titus Andronicus is usually described as Shakespeare's first tragedy, but if the emotions evoked by tragedy are pity and terror, then the description is arguable. Titus is indeed brim-full of terror, with murder, human sacrifice, rape, mutilation and cannibalism enacted in a play that is itself rancid with racial and sexual psychoses. But of pity there is scarcely a drop. Compared to King Lear, written around a decade later but telling a roughly similar story, the play is hard as coffin-nails. As horror piles on horror, it edges away from classical tragedy and toward an incredibly bleak farce.

Yet this very assault on classicism is itself one of the reasons why, after its initial popularity declined into centuries of neglect, Titus has been such a key play over the past 50 years. For, though it may be pitiless, it is not pointless. The point can be summed up in two lines. In the first scene, when Titus has returned to Rome in triumph with the Gothic queen and her sons chained to his chariot, his brother tells him: "Thou art a Roman; be not barbarous". Two acts later, the opposition between Roman and barbarian has vanished. With two of his sons about to be executed, his son-in-law murdered and his beloved daughter raped and mutilated, Titus realises "that Rome is but a wilderness of tigers". The supposed distinction between the civilised and the barbaric has been washed away in blood and pain.

The resonance today of this story of the collapse of a world-dominating empire's pretence to uphold civilisation against the "evil-doers" is obvious. And one of the many good things about Selima Cartmell's often splendid production is that she trusts her audience enough not to state the obvious. Though Monica Frawley's eloquent costumes are broadly modern, and though Jean Guy LeCat's set uses a wire cage with equally recent historical resonances, Cartmell understands that the play is not a subtle allegory that requires decoding. It is a big, brutal story that demands telling, and this is what she and her excellent cast do with remarkable lucidity.

Cartmell's approach is a highly intelligent synthesis of ideas about Titus that have developed over the past 50 years. The presence of Peter Brook's long-time collaborator LeCat establishes a connection back to Brook's landmark 1955 production with its abstract space, heavy use of music and stylised violence. All of these elements are present here at a very high level, with LeCat's promenade playing area superbly lit by Paul Keogan, and Denis Clohessy's score adding to the heightened, nightmarish atmosphere. But Cartmell also draws on the harsh realism of Deborah Warner's 1985 production, and takes the haunting idea of making a child, Titus's grandson Young Lucius, a witness to much of the horror, from Julie Taymor's more recent film version.

What's impressive, though, is the coherence with which Cartmell blends these varied and indeed outwardly contradictory approaches. The stylised elements, using a cast of thousands from the Gaiety School of Acting, are in general the least successful, but nothing really interferes with the clarity of the storytelling and the relentless forward drive of the action. That drive is vital: Cartmell uses virtually the full text, which gives a running time of around three hours and 15 minutes (including an interval). The time passes quickly, however, since scarcely a moment of it is wasted. A constantly alert sense of invention and a wonderfully confident occupation of the space mean that the pace seldom flags, even through the rougher patches.

Much of this, of course, comes down to a high-quality cast. There are particularly strong, well-focused performances from Ruth Negga as Lavinia, Aidan Kelly as Lucius, David Heap as Marcus, Olwen Fouere as Tamora, Naomi Mulholland as Young Lucius and Andrew French as Aaron, the latter bringing a vivid complexity to one of Shakespeare's more disgraceful racial stereotypes. And Owen Roe's Titus is a personal milestone for an actor whose stature has grown immensely as he moves into middle age.

He captures Titus's oddness at the beginning of the play, as a grizzled blood-soaked veteran who yet retains a deep naivety. He then draws freehand a steady arc from puzzled disbelief to numbed horror to demented hope and finally to the monstrous clowning that is all that remains in the arid terrain beyond justice and reason.

Until Dec 10