Titus Andronicus is not one of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays. Even the self-described “Last High Romantic Bardolater”, American uber-critic Harold Bloom, wishes he hadn’t “perpetrated this poetic atrocity”. Bloom sees the play as Shakespeare’s attempt to purge by parodic excess the influence of Christopher Marlowe’s hyperbolic melodrama; Anthony Burgess views this early “tongue-in-cheek (or tongue-spat-out-of-cheek) exercise” as a stab at box-office success in an ultraviolent era.
The story of a Roman general devoted to honour and tradition who gets royally shafted by a vengeful Goth queen and her Iago before wreaking his own revenge, the play is filled with events so grotesquely gory that it resembles a bloody soap opera. There are moments when the horror goes so over the top that one can only laugh.
Director Julie Taymor’s adaptation, Titus, takes it even further over the top, with transhistorical settings and costumes: Roman clothes and ruins coexist with trappings from almost every other age, up to and including what seem like some bad outfits nicked from Duran Duran. This makes for a startling spectacle with the surreal air of a nightmare, and it does add something to one’s sense of the play’s farcical “irreality” (Bloom’s word), though some of it just looks like the art director was on drugs.
The acting is uneven, as so often in Shakespeare movies, but Anthony Hopkins as Titus provides a solid centre, getting the lines across beautifully, and Harry J Lennix’s Aaron the Moor makes a manipulative villain who is both delightful in his self-conscious evil (“If one good deed in all my life I did,/ I do repent it from my very soul”) and suddenly endearing when he shows his love for his infant son. He is certainly the most complex character in the play.
And, perhaps, in this age of atrocities in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda, we are not so far from Shakespeare’s (or Titus’s) time of “murders, rapes and massacres”; we still need the catharsis of imaginative horror and tragedy. After all, what does Stephen King do?