Synetic Theater Presents Shakespeare’s ‘Titus Andronicus’ - Letter from the Director
Letter from the director of Synetic’s 13th Wordless Shakespeare production, ‘Titus Andronicus’
Fourteen killings, six severed limbs, one assault, one live burial, a case of insanity, and two acts of cannibalism involving meat pies…Shakespeare’s first play, Titus Andronicus, is not what anyone would call a light-hearted comedy. T.S. Eliot called it “…one of the stupidest plays ever written.” The poet Robert Burns was said to have nearly gone into convulsions when it was read to him as a child (though why anyone would read Titus Andronicus to a child…). Some scholars refuse to even acknowledge Shakespeare wrote it, and for more than 200 years, the play has had to fight against its reputation as a pointless, vulgar, gory, crude mess.
But Shakespeare, in attempting to trump his fellow playwrights and craft the greatest, bloodiest, most violent revenge play audiences had ever seen, created a smash hit—an Elizabethan ‘Game of Thrones,’ filled with gruesome violence, evil spirits, and all manner of family intrigue and drama. The themes of revenge and family explored in Titus have several qualities to which Shakespeare returns in later plays like Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, culminating in arguably his greatest play and the greatest piece of dramatic literature ever written: Hamlet, in which spirits, murder, insanity, suicide, and poisonings reached their Shakespearean climax. There is much of Lear in the elderly and discarded patriarch Titus Andronicus, Lady Macbeth in the similarly vicious Tamora, and Aaron clearly served as the inspiration for the supremely-manipulative masterminds Edmund, Iago, and King Richard III.
Renewed interest in the play has led to the stunning modern productions of great directors such as Peter Brook and Julie Taymor, allowing us to see how deeply moving the Titus story can be. It is a tale about the lengths that a parent will go to protect their family, about the cyclical nature of violence, about the overwhelming pull of vengeance, and the impact and horror of war. It’s all
there-- even if it can be difficult to find underneath all of those severed limbs and human-meat pies.
Titus Andronicus runs April 25 >> May 27
Tickets: http://synetictheater.org/event_pages/titus-andronicus/
