Brian Cox on Titus Andronicus

Performing Shakespeare

Brian Cox, Julian Curry

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781780011981
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare

Brian Cox discusses playing Titus Andronicus, in this ebook taken from Shakespeare On Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles.

In each volume of the Shakespeare On Stage series, a leading actor takes us behind the scenes, recreating in detail a memorable performance in one of Shakespeare's major roles. They discuss their character, working through the play scene by scene, with refreshing candour and in forensic detail. The result is a masterclass on playing the role, invaluable for other actors and directors, as well as students of Shakespeare – and fascinating for audiences of the play. In this volume, Brian Cox discusses playing the title role in Titus Andronicus in Deborah Warner's visceral production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987. This interview, together with the others in the series (with actors such as Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and Jude Law), is also available in the collection Shakespeare On Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles by Julian Curry, with a foreword by Trevor Nunn.

The whirligig of time has brought about vivid changes in attitudes to Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, first performed in 1594, is by far his most bloodthirsty work. It’s a heady brew – a story of revenge and political turmoil, full of appalling brutality, featuring multiple murders, rape, mutilation and human sacrifice. The horrors are leavened by a vein of black comedy, as for instance when two characters meet their end by being baked in a pie. The play was hugely successful in Shakespeare’s time, but for centuries Titus was written off as a sensationalist example of the blood-spattered drama that was popular in the 1590s. The critic John Dover Wilson likened it to ‘some broken-down cart, laden with bleeding corpses from the Elizabethan scaffold’, while T.S. Eliot went one better, describing Titus as ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’. However, critics have recently taken Titus Andronicus more seriously, largely on account of its various themes which presage Shakespeare’s greater plays. Like Coriolanus, Titus turns against his native Rome. Like Macbeth, he becomes dehumanised. Like Lear, he divests himself of power in the first scene. And foreshadowing Hamlet, Titus appears to go mad with grief, but leaves us unsure of the extent to which his madness is genuine.

Robert Atkins’ 1923 staging at the Old Vic was the first revival of a fully unexpurgated text for two hundred and fifty years. It caused audience members to faint. Peter Brook’s famous production in 1955 starring Laurence Olivier was a major turning point in the play’s popularity. Titus Andronicus was again a tremendous success with Brian Cox’s performance in Deborah Warner’s 1987 RSC staging in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. It was hailed as one of the greatest Shakespeare revivals of the 1980s. When working out a wish list of performances I hoped to include in this book, Cox’s Titus was a leading contender. I was stunned by it. A play which is most certainly not normally considered one of Shakespeare’s best was made plausible, contemporary and extremely hot. I talked to Brian on a pleasant morning in 2006, sitting outside a pub in Camden Town, with only occasional interference from a passing helicopter.

Julian Curry: Titus Andronicus is a play full of harshness and horror. It confronts bloody revenge, dismemberment, rape, cannibalism and murder. Titus opens the action by killing one of his sons and closes it by slaughtering his already maimed daughter. In the intervening acts, hands and tongues are cut off almost at random before doting parents eat their own offspring served up in pies. How can we take this seriously?

Brian Cox: Well, I don’t think, especially nowadays, we have to look too far for the horror. But you’ve got to remember that Titus is written by a young Shakespeare. It’s written by a Shakespeare who around the same time wrote Richard III. It’s all about authority and those who become disconnected from reality, so it has a young man’s rebellious nature. Titus is an old fart who forgets what he’s there for in the first place. He had twenty-five sons, twenty-one have been killed in battle, and it’s only when he’s down to four that he realises that he’s lost most of his children, in horrific circumstances. And he has suffered accordingly. He’s become brutalised, he’s maimed. He has served his idol, Rome, for so long, unquestioningly, and has been away for so long fighting the wars, that he’s forgotten the corruption at home. And it’s only when he finally comes home that th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Production Information
• Brian Cox on Titus Andronicus
• Other Interviews Available
• About the Author
• Copyright Information