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 the corruption brings all things closer.

The Emperor Saturninus immediately takes his prize, Tamora the Goth, and does the unthinkable by marrying her. So suddenly her boys are elevated, and his one-time captives are now princes of the realm. There are so many modern versions of that, political plays where groups of people take over from other groups of people, and they combine to get into bed together. And these are the last people to get into bed with, to shore up a state which is already crumbling, as Rome is. But Titus is old-fashioned – you know, ‘No questions asked. Do your duty. Serve.’ Rome is his great master.

Shakespeare tries out a lot of ideas in Titus Andronicus that he later develops in other plays, like Othello, like Lear, like Coriolanus. There are lots of themes in those plays which are reiterated. I think it’s a truly great play, and not very well understood, because he does it under the guise of extremely black humour. Now most productions in the past – even Peter Brook’s production – cut a lot of the laughs because they thought they were detrimental to the play. But I think the laughter in that play is absolutely vital. If you take the masks of comedy and tragedy, and put them together, you create another mask which is ludicrousness. The state of ludicrousness. And life as we look at it now… we look at Iraq, and we look at what’s happening since Saddam Hussein has gone. The insurgency outstrips the IRA by a mile. It’s a brutalised situation. But it’s ludicrous, it’s hysterical, it’s ridiculous. And I think that’s what Shakespeare’s touching on. Those are the themes he touches on very carefully in the play. He deals with them so that, point/counterpoint, one ludicrous act follows another ludicrous act, so it’s all about shocking, shocking, shocking. And it’s very twentieth-century, it’s very Artaud, it’s very Theatre of Cruelty. You look at Brook, you look at Brook’s development. You can see how a play like Titus would start him thinking about emotional Theatre of Cruelty which then, seven years later, he does at the LAMDA Theatre. And he starts his French-based theatre company. I think that’s very much based on what comes out of Titus Andronicus. In a way he couldn’t really do justice to Titus, because the main stage wouldn’t allow it at the time. So it was very stylised. And although Olivier, I think, managed to sneak in a few of the jokes, most of them were excised.

You’ve written about the image of Archie Rice [in John Osborne’s The Entertainer] being much more vivid than the image of Hamlet. What did you mean by that?

I think there’s the performing element with Titus.

You think he’s an actor?

Yeah. Because he has to pretend, which again anticipates Hamlet in feigning madness. How much does he feign madness, and how mad is he? I think he’s so far gone that he’s mad, nor’-nor’-west. He does know a hawk from a handsaw, but he is kind of motoring, he uses his madness. First of all he uses it to seduce Tamora, and also to seduce the boys and win the boys’ confidence, and then finally to murder them and bake them in the pies, and set them up for the mother. Now that’s a mad, brutal act.

You’re talking about the end of the play. Do you think he was mad earlier on?

Oh yeah. I think he realises his own insanity after the rape. The most incredible poetic piece is ‘I am the sea’, after his daughter has come out ravished, with her hands cut off and her tongue cut out. She’s the only female in that world, they’re all sons except for this one girl who is brutalised. Then of course at the end of that scene they bring on the heads of his sons. And suddenly his connection for family, which he’s not made before, all comes at once. So there’s a shock value like in a great Ibsen tragedy, that promotes something extraordinary. It’s like Titus crying, and his tears melt the snow that brings down the ice that creates the avalanche. When finally he cries, it kills him. So the final part of his destiny is set in progress. And that’s what’s so extraordinary about the play, that he motors towards this diabolic end, but taking everything down with him, taking all the fabric of what is a corrupt society with him. It’s a fascinating play, because I think that Shakespeare, as a young writer, is dealing with things in a way that is offbeat. The reason why the play seems to lack cohesion is that people can’t accept the humour. They have difficulty with the humour. And that makes them go ‘Oh, it’s not really a very good play,’ because it’s a farce. But actually it’s the humour, it’s the black humour that is cohesive, it’s the glue of the play.

It’s in the text.

It’s in the text. It really is.

‘Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth!’ [3.1]

Exactly. It’s all there. And the whole thing with the fly, the murdering of the fly. The debate about whether you should kill a fly. First he’s shocked and says ‘Marcus, what did you do?’ and then he goes nuts and starts beating the fly up. It’s the sheer shock value. So you see Shakespeare experimenting, as he does in Richard III. He experiments with something slightly different in Richard. I remember going on to direct Richard because I was in a production which I found totally unsatisfying. I wanted to rediscover the play, and what this young man was intending and why is it a tragedy. It’s called The Tragedy of Richard III. It doesn’t seem a tragedy, but then if you dig close, here is a guy who was ostracised by his mother and by his sister, and he’s been treated in such an offhand fashion that he’s become this wicked, wicked boy. And of course it’s different again with King Lear. Shakespeare in his forties starts to write this play, which is about his own rejection. Lear is a much more circumspect man who’s looking back on his life, and seeing his children’s rejection of him. And having played Lear later on, I can tell you it’s a very depressing play to do. Whereas the great thing about Titus is that it’s a blood and guts play. It’s very energising, you have to be up there because of the humour. The whole thing has a kind of Burt Lancastrian dynamic to it.

I read that ‘Cox took the audience into his confidence with nudges and winks’. You brought ‘a spirit of dangerous jocularity’ onstage with you.

Exactly, and I think that’s in the text. I was at a stage in my career as an actor… over the years I’d often felt a bit of a fish out of water with stuff that I did in the theatre, and I never could find my way in. Because I wasn’t conventional. I looked quite good as a young man but I wasn’t conventional in terms of my playing. I wasn’t your kind of effete young Englishman, or your poetic Welshman, you know, I didn’t have that. I was a sort of rough-hewn Scot. Titus represented for me a kind of release. As a younger actor I was always asked to be tasteful – there was a decorous element about what one did, for fear of going across into bad taste. And what Deborah encouraged in me was the opposite. She encouraged my clowning, she encouraged my roots which lie in Jerry Lewis as opposed to Laurence Olivier. She encouraged that element which actually is where I come from, those wonderful comedic Scottish actors like Duncan Macrae and Fulton Mackay. Alastair Sim. There’s an extraordinary element to them. And also John Laurie, who was a great, classic Scots actor. He was one of the leading men of the immediate post-First World War Shakespeare revival at the Vic. He played all those Hamlets. I remember John Laurie telling me this wonderful story. He said ‘D’ye know I had this idea, son. When Hamlet… ye know… I thought… ye know… when Hamlet’s finally stabbed in the fight and he turns to Horatio, I thought… ye know… it’s a great idea just to say, “I’m dead, Horatio.” And I thought it should get a laugh! But of course the powers… Lilian Baylis didn’t like that at all. She said “Oh, ye cannee do that, John,” But they’d laugh!’ If you think about it there is a black humour in the play. And the setting of Titus was really very fortunate.

Can you describe the setting?

We did a thing they’d never done at Stratford. We started without any designer or any set, and we designed it as we went. Basically we had the idea of this big sandpit, like an extended children’s sandbox. And we had images of clay, that came up through rehearsal. Then we had a wonderful designer called Isabella Bywater. Originally there was a leaning towards a Mafia kind of thing, but then we felt that located it too much in a specific environment, which always becomes limiting. So we decided against that – it wasn’t going to work, so we threw it out. And then we came up with what we felt served our production, which was much more classical, much more Brechtian, using Roman artefacts and leather, swords and all that. But very, very simple.

But not set in the Roman period?

Well, we didn’t exaggerate the Roman period. At one point we used a light bulb. But we were dressed sort of pseudo-Roman. If you look at Elizabethan Roman plays, they were often set in Elizabethan dress with elements of Ancient Rome. We did a similar thing with the twentieth century. We had a flavour of guerrilla soldiers, say Cuban rebels, Che Guevara, with armour and rough khaki and rough hessian. And off-greeny-grey linen clothes. We did a twentieth-century version of a Roman idea.

Lets the play breathe more.

That’s right. And keeps the play much more plastic, which is what it requires.

Most directors come with a strong idea of a production from day one. You’re describing a totally different process, aren’t you?

Deborah doesn’t do that. Deborah has a very strong aesthetic, but she always keeps her aesthetic up her sleeve. I think subsequently as a director, she’s allowed the aesthetic to come much more to the fore. But in those days that wasn’t the case. In those days she played better poker with it. She didn’t allow the aesthetic to rear its head too early. You’ll see it more in Deborah’s later productions like Richard II and The Good Person of Szechuan. And then she moved on to work with Hildegard Bechtler, and it became omnipresent. But with Isabella, who she only worked with the once, it was a developing thing. It was much more organic. We took what was in the rehearsal room, and converted it. She would take implements, like these ladders that we used during rehearsal. We hit upon this brilliant idea of the boys – Titus’ captives on their first entrance – being locked into the ladders, chained to the ladders. We used the ladders horizontally as yokes. And then we thought ‘Well, sitting on the ladder, could be Titus.’ So we devised this most extraordinary entrance for Titus, that he was carried in on the ladder held by these boys in a yoke. They’re all supposed to be chained up anyway, like slaves. So the image was Titus coming on and being greeted, followed by his sons, with Tamora and her two boys and Aaron the Moor in their yokes. It was a brilliant image. But it came within the rehearsal process, it came one day when somebody grabbed a ladder and put his head through it. It’s got the Brook influence on it, and it worked, it worked incredibly well. Deborah had that trust all the way through. I remember Estelle Kohler found it really difficult because she’d worked in such a traditional Royal Shakespeare way. When the sons were given to illustrating the stories, it was kind of fantastical, which Estelle found very throwing and she had to rethink.

What do you mean? I haven’t got that. What were the sons doing?

Well, during their scenes the sons would do these pantomimic acts. They’d do all kinds of jokey things. Estelle found that tricky because she’s used to classical Shakespearean enunciation, and ‘This is my moment, this is Tamora’s moment.’ But Deborah wouldn’t cut that business, she allowed it. She wanted much more of a sense of immediacy, rather than something that was beautifully rehearsed and beautifully presented. But in fairness to Estelle, she really took it on. She had worked in Stratford with a particular style, and suddenly she had to start again. She developed a much better sense of improvisation. And it worked. It wasn’t improvised in the end – what we did was very clearly set down, it was like learning dance steps. Same thing in the scene towards the end where I was mad and started serving imaginary tea, I was miming teapots and counting the cups. It was a preamble to my dressing up in the chef’s outfit. And we did the ‘Heigh-ho’!

That took a lot of stick from the critics.

That took a lot of stick from the critics but it…

Were they right or wrong?

We only used a phrase of it. We wanted to do ‘Off to work we go’. We wanted to constantly knock the audience off-balance, so they weren’t getting what was expected, they were having to rethink very quickly. And it worked. Of course the purists get on their high horses. I’ve done it before. I did it in a production where John Peter damned me for using saxophones instead of trumpets. I used saxophones in Richard III, because I prefer the sound, I just like that sound.

One review said ‘Every line of text seems to have been worked over with scrupulously colourless intelligence.’ Which I thought was an odd sort of backhanded compliment. What do you make of that?

I don’t understand that. ‘Scrupulously colourless.’ It was certainly scrupulous, but I don’t think colourless. We worked over every line in terms of the meaning, or in terms of what the trajectory of the play was. You have to get the trajectory very clear in terms of where the textual intention of the play is going. You have to be absolutely clear on that front. Especially when you’re doing a lot of very physical things as well. You can’t just make it a purely physical production. I remember warning Deborah about this. I said ‘There was a famous Midsummer Night’s Dream that Brook did, which was a very liberating production, but parts of the text went out the window. And sometimes you didn’t quite get the rhymes, or why they moved from verse into rhyming couplets.’ I felt we had to be very careful, we couldn’t just make it a bunch of young people’s rants, we had to be meticulous. Maybe it’s a subeditor’s misprint – maybe he meant colourful rather than colourless!

The play’s full of violence and horror. Could you describe how some of the violence was staged?

Something implied is always much more scary than what is actually visible. So when my sons’ heads were cut I off I said ‘Don’t let’s have phoney imitation heads, let’s have heads that are covered in muslin, blood-soaked, so you imagine that the contents are really pretty horrific.’ When they were brought on, I’m with Marcus and I literally chuck one at Donald Sumpter, so he has to catch it like a goalkeeper. And of course with the head flying across the stage in a muslin bag, and Donald having to catch it… you’d hear a gasp from the audience because it just happened so quickly. And for cutting off my hand, we put a bag over it and used a wire cheese-cutter. Once the bag was over my hand I curled it up like this (I had a big enough sleeve) and Aaron put the cheese wire round and pulled it through. It appeared that my hand was in the bag, which then filled with blood. Everybody gasped, people fainted. We had people literally being carried out, especially when Lavinia came on. Her stumps were all wrapped, bloody, but again there was no bare flesh. It was always what seemed to be underneath – that was pretty horrific. That element of the production was very powerful.

I’ve got a recollection of people being stabbed, not in the corny old way under the armpit or in the ribs, but straight up between their legs in the groin.

Yeah, yeah. And the other thing was when I killed Lavinia [5.3]. Instead of stabbing her I used her like a ventriloquist’s dummy. She sat on my knee, my child sitting on my knee, and then I broke her neck.

With one hand?

Using the stump, holding her neck against the stump, I turned her head away like this and broke her neck with the other hand. It was a very quick action. Donald was sitting behind me and he had a stick which he broke, so you heard this snap. Again it was so quick.

Tasty stuff.

It was all part and parcel of what the play is about. The play is about violent acts, sudden violent actions. But it was never pantomimic, because the grief element of the play is so powerful. David Bradley came to see it about five times, and I remember him saying it was the best play about grief he’d ever seen. The mourning element, the mourning of the daughter. And ‘I am the sea’ [3.1]. That scene, which is all about grief, about the realisation of losing his sons, it’s just fantastic stuff. Here’s this writer experimenting with ideas, and you see so many that have not left us, that’s what’s so fabulous about the play. People went ‘Ah well, you know, Titus is just a grumpy old beast, it’s not as great as the other plays.’ But I quarrel with that.

He’s got more cause to go mad than King Lear.

Oh yes, much more cause to go mad than King Lear. Lear has really just got his ungrateful daughters…

It’s a picnic by comparison.

Exactly. Lear is a picnic! It’s a deeper thing in Lear, though, but again the themes are there. I didn’t enjoy Lear as much as Titus. It’s just an enjoyable play. You came offstage and you felt that you’d had a workout by the end of it. And it did mark the card a little bit on the play, because people saw it and went ‘Wow.’ And then, you know, there have been productions since which have tried to go down that route, but haven’t quite come at it from where we came at it. Because I think, historically, we hit a very interesting time. We liberated the play from its Victorian mythology. Brook was a great fan of it. He came to see it and said ‘I couldn’t have done that in 1955. I couldn’t have done what you did. We didn’t have the actors, in terms of an ensemble, who were prepared to do that kind of stuff.’

Most of the characters seem fairly straightforward, apart from Titus. But he’s wonderfully complex. Going back to the beginning of the play, why did you turn down the candidacy to be Emperor? And why did you support Saturninus?

I think it’s the fact that he’s a soldier, he’s not a politician. And he’s not of royal blood. There are feudal elements to the play, and he sees very clearly where he is on the feudal ladder. He makes the wrong choice in supporting Saturninus, but he does it in order to safeguard something which… he believes that things are going to be better served by Saturninus. And he makes a massive error of judgement. Actually the reason he doesn’t take on the candidacy of Rome is because he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to be Emperor, that’s not who he is.

He says ‘I’m too old, too tired, you’ll have to elect somebody else tomorrow…’ But do you think he really means it? Does he want to be asked three times?

No, I don’t think he does, I think that’s his honesty. He’s an honest, bluff old soldier. That’s what makes him an attractive character. Alright, he becomes wiry and wily, and he does all these tricks later on, but basically he’s served Rome, and he’s served Rome pretty well. His relationship to Rome is a very good one, because he’s not done anything for himself. He’s never feathered his own nest. He’s given, given, given. And this is why the act of betrayal is so great. It suddenly dawns on him, ‘I’ve given my whole life to the idea of Rome. I’ve given to the Royal Family, I’ve given to what I believed was right, I’ve followed traditional values.’ He’s very much a traditionalist. It’s like Mountbatten or somebody, who’s gone on doing certain things in a certain kind of way for truth, and finally he gets treated so badly that he flips. He suddenly says ‘Well, hang on a second, I don’t think this is right. I think this is wrong, and I’ve got to do something about it.’ It’s a bit late in the day, but I think he is a servant to Rome, and that’s what he sees in himself.

Would you say Titus has a tragic flaw?

Yes, his tragic flaw is that he doesn’t ask questions. He’s unquestioning, he’s a killing machine, and as a result he becomes brutalised. He sees the death of his sons as being rather noble. But then it impinges on him. When you’ve got thirty sons you don’t notice it, but when it’s down to four you begin to think ‘Hang on, they’ve all gone!’

So what’s his journey through the play? What does he learn?

The journey is to realise that he’s lost his humanity, and to try to reclaim it. Which is what he does, in a sense, even by the dastardly killing of his daughter. And his line is guaranteed because at the end of the play his son takes over. It’s really interesting that at the beginning of the play he was obviously a bit of a hero. He was a very popular figure. But if you are in the face of such action for so long, and you’re used to serving, serving, serving, you begin not to be able to see further than the end of your nose. It happens to a lot of old soldiers, you know. Soldiers on the whole tend to live long lives, and they go through changes. They can emerge quite wise, but sometimes they behave brutally.

Looking at the play, you’d be tempted to think Titus pays a price that’s way in excess of what he deserves for his faults.

Yes, I think to a certain extent that is true. But Shakespeare’s a young man who’s rubbing authority’s face in the dirt. He’s always playing with that, Shakespeare. His whole attitude to authority is questioning. ‘Thou ladder which overreaches itself,’ or words to that effect, Richard II says to Northumberland. He talks about the ladder, in the sense of people going beyond what they’re supposed to. And neglect. Lear: ‘I have taken / Too little care of this’ [3.4]. He talks about neglect constantly, about these great figures who neglect their responsibility. There’s a very powerful moral imperative throughout his plays. He talks about it in Richard II and in Henry VI, with the King wandering around saying ‘Oh, I haven’t really done what I should have done.’ The Lancastrian wars, all of that. He’s seen people who have neglected something very vital, a human responsibility or one of state. We think that the time we live in has become debased, but so many things go way back. They had Walsingham, they had the Cecils, and all the internecine struggles of these people who were running the country on Elizabeth’s behalf. And I think Shakespeare thought ‘These guys are a bunch of wankers. They’re bastards, and they’ve let us down very badly.’ His plays are full of references to ‘We’ve allowed things to slip, we’ve allowed things to go’, and Titus is about that. Titus is about this man who finally realises he’s been fighting for the state so long, he hasn’t noticed how decadent it has become until too late, and he has to pay the price. And Shakespeare says ‘In order for you to redeem yourself you’re going to have to walk barefoot on coals,’ and that’s what he puts Titus through. So there is a sense of redemption. It is heroic, ultimately. But it’s quite interesting, where that kind of heroism comes from. Because we don’t think of it as a heroic play. We think of other plays being much more heroic than Titus Andronicus.

Can you describe your appearance?

In the first scene I came on caked in mud, and later as I got madder the mud increased. My image was all to do with a corroded statue. It was to do with the statue of a once young, healthy soldier that over the years had been corroded, and then bits had broken away, and the nose had gone. I wanted this sense that the brutalising nature of his life had corroded him physically, and this was the last bestial act of corrosion. There was also a self-amelioration, in the sense that as he gets crazier and crazier, he comes to recognise his corrosion.

What about the chef’s outfit at the end?

Well, it’s a sudden… it’s way off… it’s outfield. But it’s also to do with waking the audience up, and saying ‘Now we’re in this Walt Disney world.’ Suddenly there’s this guy coming on like one of those French chefs with a moustache, and doing that ‘Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho!’ And they think ‘My God, this is weird!’ It’s also distressing, because the audience don’t quite know what to do. They go ‘What is this?’ And then that’s taken to its extreme with the baking of Tamora’s sons in a pie, and getting her to eat it. He’s gone, because he’s played madness to a point where the line has been crossed. And then of course he comes back out of it again. It’s an astonishing play, a truly astonishing play.

In the final scene there are three murders in three lines. Deaths purge, up to a point, and scores are settled. Your son Lucius becomes Emperor. Is there anything more positive, more upbeat that you recall?

I think, just relief. Relief it’s all over.

For?

For everybody! The evening. The war is over. It’s like the Iraq conflict. What a relief it’ll be when we get out of there, if we sort it out. It’s not sorted out. Looks as if it’s not going to be sorted out… But a sense that after the events of the night, you don’t need to comment on them by going into a big celebration. You just have to say ‘Alright, he’s King now. We’ve stopped. Enough. Now we’re moving on.’ Which is life.

Can you sum up?

He wrote a crowd piece, but he wrote it under the guise of all these ideas. He thought ‘How can I do what I want to do, and at the same time make the money, make it successful?’ And as you said, Titus was one of the most successful plays of the period. But he just threw everything at it. He threw the whole kitchen sink at it, and said ‘I’m going to have a riot, I’m going to go nuts, I’m going to put in every idea.’ And I reiterate: King Lear, Coriolanus, Othello, Macbeth, every single play is in that play.

A returning warrior, who doesn’t know how to cope with life back home…

Exactly. It’s fascinating, it’s absolutely fascinating.

How was doing it in a small theatre? That must have been helpful?

It was, especially when people kept fainting! And in The Pit they used to wander onto the stage. One time I was mid-performance and I heard this woman go ‘Help me, help me!’ She was sitting in one of the side seats. I had to take her, still acting at the same time, and walk her off the stage into the vomitorium. I said to the ushers, ‘Get her out of here!’ As soon as she got past, she was on the floor, out for the count! That happened twice.

I’m not surprised.

They were so overcome. We had a man die in Paris.

Really?

Oh yeah. It’s nothing to be proud of, but somebody actually died, at the end of the first act.

Of a heart attack?

Yeah. At the Bouffes du Nord. He sat in his seat and he didn’t get up at the interval. It’s a thing to go out on. Good God!