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 Shakespeare’s bloodiest play gets a modern reworking in ANATOMY TITUS FALL OF ROME: A SHAKESPEARE COMMENTARY, presented by Queensland Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare. SEANNA VAN HELTEN chats to actor TIMOTHY WALTER.
If your English teacher was cool enough to drag out Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus instead of Macbeth, then you would know that Titus is the most graphic, gory and downright gruesome of all the Bard’s tragedies. Set in Rome in the aftermath of war, the play follows the fate of Titus Andronicus, a great military leader who returns to Rome victorious as the new emperor. But the corrupt Roman court is a battlefield of another kind, spiralling into vengeful, brutal chaos.
Co-presented by Queensland Theatre Company and Sydney-based company Bell Shakespeare, and directed by Michael Gow, Anatomy Titus Fall Of Rome is a revised, modern exploration of Shakespeare’s play by German playwright Heiner Müller. Adding to Shakespeare’s play a contemporary “commentary”, Müller “has taken Titus and ripped it to bits,” explains actor Timothy Walter. “His own text is interspersed throughout the play and these sections bring the play screaming into our current landscape.”
Walter plays Aaron the Moor, one of original play’s (many) villains: “In this production he is still awful and does a whole lot of evil things but he also takes on another role as an MC character for the evening. He’s a kind of ringmaster to the show and keeps the whole thing rolling along.
“This character is written as a black character and I’m not black so that was quite a challenge!” continues Walter. He explains that he will be “blacking up” for the role, a controversial costuming choice in an era of political correctness. “I think in this particular instance it’s going to work,” the actor says. “The kind of commentary that Heiner Muller has written makes these references to how Shakespeare approached black characters and how race issues sit in our modern world.”
In another unusual casting twist, director Gow has chosen for the production an all-male cast playing both male and female roles. Does this offer commentary on gender, as well as race? “Absolutely… Titus Andronicus is a very war-like play … so to have only men in the play raises some very interesting questions about the play and also about the world we live in,” muses Walter.
“The other thing I should mention,” Walter continues, “is that the set is designed so it looks like we’re performing in the rehearsal room … all the cast are wearing costumes that reflect what they ordinarily wear, so there’s a real sense of us being the actors playing roles” – whether black, white, male, or female.
Bell Shakespeare’s artistic director John Bell has said that the violence in Titus Andronicus is so extreme the tragedy would be better understood as a black comedy. “That’s right,” agrees Walter, “the play is so barbaric and bloodthirsty that it crosses a line from any sort of realism into farce, in a way. It’s so absurd in its cruelty!
“But at the same time there’s a real truth to it,” he adds. Largely unperformed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Walter explains that the revival of Titus on mainhouse stages coincided with the bloody, war-torn twentieth century. “People have begun to realise that this sort of cruelty does exist in the world and we can actually relate to this play … It’s a bizarre piece because as well as being violent it’s also quite funny. The trick is trying to make the audience laugh when we want them to laugh and gasp when we want them to gasp.”
ANATOMY TITUS FALL OF ROME plays at the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC from September 4 to October. For tickets phone 136 246 or visit www.qldtheatreco.com.au.
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