Eight years after a stomach-churning, splatter-fest production of Titus Andronicus led to some audience members fainting, Shakespeare’s Globe is to ask how do you generate a similar murderous horror in a more intimate, candle-lit space?
The solution? The candles get bumped off.
Jude Christian’s forthcoming production of Shakespeare’s goriest, most violent play comes with many warnings, including there being “extreme violence and death … body mutilations, cannibalism, rape and self-harm.”
For the avoidance of doubt it adds: “This content may be extremely upsetting for many.”
But it will be a very different demonstration of violence in its Sam Wanamaker Playhouse space. Each character will, the Guardian understands, have a candle avatar that in turn is pummelled, gored or snuffed out completely when the text dictates.
Characters may use meat cleavers, or heat guns, or metal tenderisers to inflict the violence. Sometimes the spraying wax means safety equipment will be needed. The show, which runs from January to April, has an all-female cast.
The theatre is keen to stress that the intention is not to sanitise violence or spare audiences – and points to shows such as The Woman in Black, which succeeds in being truly terrifying by relying on audiences using their own imagination.
“It will feel like the audience is in a torture chamber,” said one theatre source.
“It’s a different approach to violence,” Christian told the Sunday Telegraph.
Christian is understood to be interested in the public’s continuing fascination and appetite for extreme violence, as evidenced by the success of the Netflix series Squid Game.
Her previous productions include a mashup of Othello and Macbeth. The Guardian’s Michael Billington did not care much for the Othello but the Macbeth was “one of the clearest, most compelling versions of the play I have seen in a long while.”
Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s first and most deadly revenge tragedy with a – spoiler alert – body count of 14 compared with 11 in Richard III and 10 in King Lear.
To say the violence sometimes comes thick and fast is an understatement. One of its most memorable moments is when Tamora, Queen of the Goths, is served a pie filled with the cooked flesh of her own sons, Chiron and Demetrius.
“Why, there they are, both baked in this pie,” says Titus. “Whereof their mother daintily hath fed/ Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred/ ’Tis true, ’tis true! Witness my knife’s sharp point.”
At which point Titus stabs Tamora. Saturninus then kills Titus. Lucius then kills Saturninus.
Lucy Bailey’s 2006 production of Titus Andronicus for Shakespeare’s Globe was striking for its no-holds-barred bloodiness.
The revival in 2014 was even gorier, with reports of audience members fainting when they were confronted with Lavinia without tongue or hands.
“Nasty, but oh so very, very nice, too,” said the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner of the show.
The theatre’s audience effectively became the citizens of Rome in the production. “It spares us nothing … There is no getting away from our complicity in the unfolding events as heads roll, blood spurts and hearts crack.”
Audience fainting is rare but not unheard of in theatre. At least five people fainted and 40 walked out in the first week of the National Theatre’s 2016 production of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. The show featured characters being electrocuted, force-fed and tortured, including the removal of one character’s tongue 20 minutes into the play.
A spokesperson for Shakespeare’s Globe said: “The intimate candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse will become a feast for the senses – with sight, smell, and sound all working together to create a sort of survival game torture chamber holding the action of the play.
“From the gladiatorial arena to Squid Game we have always loved the ultraviolent to entertain us, and Jude Christian’s Titus will not hold back.
“Candles – standing in for characters – will be smashed, melted, and disfigured – this is the only theatre to use real flame from over a hundred candles per show – what could be more perfect to get across the fragility of human life, and the horror of the play?”
