[In the following excepted review of James Edmondson's 2002 Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Titus Andronicus, Berlin notes that Edmondson severely blunted the comic potentially of the drama in favor of monstrous horror and brutal retribution.]

Titus Andronicus was performed on the outdoor Elizabethan Stage, so called because the dimensions are similar to those of the Fortune Theatre, but it is not an authentic Elizabethan theater for a number of reasons. It has side exits, large doors in the center of the stage, and various staging platforms. The audience is seated and spread out (no groundlings here!), and the performances are open to an evening sky, not the afternoon sky of the Elizabethans. Not as compact as the Globe, which was able to accommodate two or three thousand with good sight lines and supposedly fine acoustics, Ashland's outdoor theater, like most large outdoor theaters, seems to demand broader acting, more attention to clear and loud delivery, larger gestures. That demand was successfully met in the performance of Shakespeare's very early, excessively violent play, one that has received very harsh criticism through the years, including T. S. Eliot's much-quoted opinion that Titus is “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.” Some fine modern productions—especially Laurence Olivier's in 1957 and Deborah Warner's in 1987—allow us to gauge its theatrical appeal, perhaps even to understand why it was an enormous success during Shakespeare's time, already making him a playwright to reckon with. In Titus, Shakespeare piles on the atrocities, stretches the horrors of the popular revenge play beyond anything conceived by Seneca or Kyd or Webster, and seems to be saying to his audience, “Here I am! See what I can do!” (Of course, as we know now, and his audience couldn't know at the time, he would, eight years later, stretch the revenge play in another direction and give us Hamlet.)

Before the loud flourish that brings many Romans on stage, the Ashland audience is staring at huge sculptures, a broken hand on each side of the stage, and a tilted broken head in stage center. Largeness and fracture. Immediately the director, James Edmondson, is making a statement about the Rome of fourth century a.d. which was coming to the end of its long domination of much of the world. But the play's action, although within that large historical context, involves personal agonies, sacrifice, revenge, love, so that the horrible events can be happening at any time. Edmondson chose not to place the play in a modern setting with modern costuming, believing that the imagined antiquity of his setting allows us to feel the story's universal quality. So modern is this story of brutal revenge, as Edmondson sees it, that his program notes offer as an epigraph these words from a father in the Middle East, as reported on ABC News, March 2002: “If you kill our children, we will kill your children.” Edmondson never identifies the father as Palestinian or Israeli, and that's the point, of course. The quote allows us to place the horrors of Shakespeare's early tragedy (melodrama, really) in our time, now.

The play's dark mood is captured immediately when we witness the triumphant homecoming of Titus from his successful defense of Rome against the Goths, with the Queen of the Goths, Tamora, his captive, along with her three sons and her Moorish lover, Aaron. The triumph is muted by the ceremonial entrance of Titus's four sons carrying the coffins of his two dead sons. (His nineteen other sons have been killed in the war.) According to Roman custom, the death of his sons demands a funeral sacrifice. Ignoring Tamora's passionate appeal, Titus puts to death Tamora's eldest son by having his limbs hewed and his body burned. Here revenge takes on a religious, sacrificial aura. As the play progresses revenge will be the relentless theme, usually not connected with religion. Blood will have blood, atrocities will pile up, and no character will emerge unaffected by the cycles of violence. Among the many horrors that the audience must witness are these: the rape of Titus's daughter, Lavinia, by Tamora's sons, followed by their cutting out her tongue and cutting off her hands so that she should not reveal their identity; Aaron's cutting off of Titus's left hand which he is willing to part with in exchange for his sons' lives; the arrival of a messenger with the heads of his sons and his own recently severed left hand; Titus cutting the throats of Tamora's sons while Lavinia, holding a basin in her stumps, catches their blood; Titus serving, and Tamora eating, a dainty pastry made of the blood, flesh, and bones of Tamora's sons. This kind of grisly violence seems to have had enormous theatrical appeal in Shakespeare's time, and the OSF production, if we can judge by audience reception, found it appealing too.

Edmondson directed a fast-moving production, with violence and horror sharing the stage with moments of real pathos (as one would expect in the reactions of characters to Lavinia, for example). All of the actors gave solid performances, with some having less to achieve than others because Shakespeare didn't provide too much opportunity for shades of character. Saturninus, for example, was pure tyrant, Lavinia pure victim, Tamora and her sons malevolence personified. William Langan, playing Titus, clearly captured the pride of the returning warrior, his world weariness (“When will this fearful slumber have an end?”), his cruelty in the name of honor, his disillusionment, and finally his madness. He repels us and then he engages us, with Shakespeare never allowing us to forget that his Roman behavior, supposedly honorable, is not much different from the barbarism of Rome's enemies, the Goths. As often happens in productions of Titus Andronicus, Aaron the Moor emerges as the most interesting character. Derrick Lee Weeden, who has been with OSF for thirteen seasons, displayed enormous vitality and self-sufficiency in the role. He is the prime manipulator of the play's cruelty and violence, taking great pleasure in his own wickedness and managing to make us feel some of that pleasure. As a black man, he's the outsider who knows the true nature of the insiders, and his cunning machinations, what he calls his “sport,” deserve some guilty admiration. He boasts about his evil accomplishments, cursing the day he did not do “some notorious ill.” He appears most attractive when he attempts to protect his black son, born to Tamora. He takes pride in the child's blackness, a kind of family pride displayed throughout by the Romans. In this, as in the violent and brutal behavior, barbaric Moor and honorable Roman seem to have a similar set of values.

This was a solid and satisfying production. I think the director could have paid more attention to the comic possibilities of some of the action. A relentlessly dark mood pervades the play, which Edmondson relieves only once when Titus, his son Lucius, and his brother Marcus quarrel with one another for the privilege of having a hand cut off. When they raise their hands to volunteer, like children in a classroom raising their hands to go to the bathroom, laughter trickled through the audience. This was a welcome momentary respite from the horrors that preceded and succeeded the scene.

Shakespeare gives the director many such opportunities in the play, enough to provoke some scholars to believe that Shakespeare is making fun of the genre, offering a burlesque of revenge tragedy. I would not go that far, but surely there is something gruesomely comical in Titus acting as a chef serving that meat pie to Tamora, in Titus's sons falling into a pit and ineptly trying to pull themselves out, in Aaron's overblown villainy that touches farce at times, even in the rapid, mechanical succession of deaths at the end—Titus kills Lavinia, then he kills Tamora, then Saturninus stabs Titus, then Lucius stabs Saturninus. Edmondson chose not to exploit these potentially comical moments; instead he provided, and successfully, a world of unrelieved decadence.