Thoughts on Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus, Two Gentleman of Verona, Coriolanus
The Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford Festival
The Observer

A blackboard at the side of the Stratford stage announces The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Titus Andronicus but the two plays are given in the reverse order. So now we know why the RSC postponed the press night for this double bill; it took them two extra days to turn the thing around.

The present arrangement is surely the right one. Best to get the terrors of Titus over while you are still fresh, and to come back from your interval drinks to a divertissement. So it was at the Old Vic, in my extreme youth, when Titus was coupled with The Comedy of Errors in texts edited by John Barton, then still in his donnish days. Now, of course, he directs as well, inheriting from those long-gone productions the notion of having the two plays done as if by strolling players. When we arrive the company are hunting out props and trying on costumes. When the entertainment begins those not immediately involved sit around on hampers, looking duly horrified in the first play and amused in the second.

These responses are intended, I presume, to be contagious; and on the whole they are. There are, to borrow Peter Brook’s terminology, two methods of staging Titus Andronicus: the holy and the rough. The first, by ceremonalising the murders and mutilations that comprise the bulk of the action, freezes any unseemly giggles on our lips; but may also stop us believing the story. The second, which is Mr Barton’s way here, is to play everything full-frontal. There are inevitably laughs when the concluding banquet three characters fall dead in as many lines, or, more nervously, when Patrick Stewart as Titus chops off his own hand before our eyes. However, Mr Stewart is also capable of amputating audience reactions; from a fine show of mellow military authority he passes into a cruelly gentle madness that repeatedly wipes the smile off our faces.

The moments for greatest risk afford the greatest rewards; Titus orders his daughter, Lavinia, raped and robbed of her hands and tongue, to bear his hand between her teeth; this is done quite realistically - she has red stumps and a matching gash where her mouth should be- and it is appallingly believable. Anyway the twentieth century has no right to patronize the sixteenth for its taste in atrocities- except perhaps on the grounds of excessive tameness.

Sheila Hancock takes the Queen of Goths seriously enough to play her with an appropriately Germanic accent (oddly not shared by her gangster sons who are played as a pair of engaging slobs kicked out of the very best schools) and once the initial shock is past- for her, I suspect as well as us- she develops considerable power. In her black corner she has Hugh Quarshie, a very smooth Moor, and in white Bernard Lloyd, one of the silkily berserk Roman Emperors.

Capable and conscientious thought it is, I doubt if this Titus is going to flower into anything definitive. The Two Gentleman stands a better chance, being the fountainhead of the comedies of youthful folly that Mr Barton long ago annexed for his own. At the moment it is rather fain (sometimes actually inaudible), perhaps because in casting appropriately young, Mr Barton has wound up with actors unready to do more than go enthusiastically through the right attitudes. Peter Land’s floppy, curly-topped Proteus is the best, especially commendable for doing his own serenading.

Otherwise the best performance is Mr Stewart’s chivalrous old Sir Elgamour, who could be Titus fallen on good times. Miss Hancock appears as an aspiring Maid Marian with an unrequited crush on Robin Hood. Each of her fellow outlaws is doing his own comic bit but they have not been coordinated. It is pleasant, though, to see them all carrying their own chunks of forest as if getting in practice for Birnam Wood. The same idea is used non-comically in Titus; Aaron effects a scene change by bringing on a tree when talking of the woods and it is very effective. There are also hobby horses in both; those in The Two Gentlemen are intentionally funny.

If not vintage RSC, this is still good exploratory stuff. How stands it in the world at large? Well, going from the ground up: perhaps the greatest change in Shakespearean production is that we now believe in flat stages. Twenty years ago the plays were always performed up and down staircases. There is a permanent reminded of those days in the platform stage at Stratford, Ontario, built to the specifications of the Fifties’ maestro Tyrone Guthrie, with immovable steps at its extremities and a pillar rostrum at its centre. When full, this amphitheatre is the most thrilling house I know, with the audience sitting and responding in an unbroken homogenous arc.

As for acting; if rawness is a recurring weakness here, anonymous competence is the curse of Canada. This was the case before Robin Phillips took over, it remained so during his tenure, and judging from what I saw there a couple of weeks ago, it has not changed with his stormy departure.

The new chief is John Hirsch, probably Canada’s best director (the only man I know able to move with equal authority from Chekov to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). But he was appointed too late to stage any shows himself. He has called on two veterans of the pre-Phillips era. Peter Dews, who contributed a fair Comedy of Errors and the French Jean Gascon, who did a first-rate version of Durrenmatt’s The Visit suggesting that the American theatre is close to Europe, more at home with expressionism and its derivatives, than our own, which likes to humanize everything. Gascon always staged a clear, decorative Misanthrope with a light-weight but acute Alceste from Brian Bedford.

Mr Bedford, who was one of Mr Phillips imported stars, has also blossomed as a director. Under the last regime he staged one of those ceremonial Tituses and this year a highly praised Coriolanus. I found it disappointing; with the resources for a believable mob- more actors than we these days ever dream of- he failed to clarify their effect on the central political scenes, which are perfectly written and almost impossible to realize. 

The main attraction was Len Cariou, who, thought Canadian born, works mainly in the United States, where his Sweeney Todd had real, indeed frightening tragic stature. It may be, though, that playing in musicals has robbed his voice of necessary jaggedness, for though he split movingly apart when Coriolanus yields, and had a tremendous defiance at the end, he missed the irony that runs through the part as well as the play. But he was a presence.

This hastily prepared season is turning out better than many people expected - or in some cases, hoped.