TITUS ANDRONICUS by William Shakespeare 1955 Sir Laurence Olivier as Titus and Vivien Leigh as Lavinia in TITUS ANDRONICUS, 1955

Review by Kenneth Tynan from Curtains I have always had a soft spot for Titius Andronicus, in spite of the fact that I have often heard it called the worst thing Marlowe ever wrote. Whoever wrote it, whether a member of the Shakespeare syndicate or the chairman himself, he deserves our thanks for having shown us, at the dawn of our drama, just how far drama could go. Like Goya's "Disasters of War", this is tragedy naked, godless, and unredeemed, a carnival of carnage in which pity is the first man down. We have since learned how to sweeten tragedy, to make it ennobling, but we would do well to remember that Titus is the raw material, "the thing itself", the piling of agony on to a human head until it splits.

For now I stand as one upon a rock,
Environ'd with a wilderness of sea . . .

Much textual fiddling is required if we are to swallow the crudities, and in this respect Mr. Brook is as swift with the styptic pencil as the author is with the knife. He lets the blood, one might say, out of the bath. All visible gore is eliminated from the play, so that Lavinia, tongueless and handless, can no longer be likened to "a conduit with three issuing spouts." With similar tact, Mr. Brook cuts the last five words of Titus' unspeakable line, "Why, there they are both, baked in that pie," as he serves to Tamora his cannibalistic specialty - tete de fils en pate (pour deux personnes).

Adorned by a vast, ribbed setting (the work of Mr. Brook, designer) and accompanied by an eerie throbbing of musique concrete (the work of Mr. Brook, composer), the play is now ready for the attentions of Mr. Brook, director. The result is the finest Shakespearean production since the same director tackled Measure for Measure five years ago. The vocal attack is such that even the basest lines shine, like Aaron the Moor, "in pearl and gold." Anthony Quayle plays the latter role with superbly corrupt flamboyance, and Maxine Audley is a glittering Tamora. As Lavinia, Vivien Leigh receives the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband's corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber. Otherwise, the minor parts are played up to the hilt.

Sir Laurence Olivier's Titus, even with one hand gone, is a five-finger exercise transformed into an unforgettable concerto of grief. This is a performance which ushers us into the presence of one who is, pound for pound, the greatest actor alive. As usual, he raises one;s hair with the risks he takes. Titus enters not as a beaming hero but as a battered veteran, stubborn and shambling, long past caring about the people's cheers. A hundred campaigns have tanned his heart to leather, and from the cracking of that heart there issues a terrible music, not untinged by madness. One hears great cries, which, like all of this actor's best effects, seem to have been dredged up from an ocean-bed of fatigue. One recognised, though one had never heard it before, the noise made in its last extremity by the cornered human soul. We knew from his Hotspur and his Richard III that Sir Laurence could explode. Now we know that he can suffer as well. All the grand unplayable parts, after this, are open to him: Skelton's Magnificence, Ibsen's Brand, Goethe's Faust - anything, so long as we can see those lion eyes search for solace, that great jaw sag.

. . .Mercutio . . .can be vulgarised into a noisy swasher who would never have had upon his lips the glistening aria of Queen Mab. As Scofield played him, he was the Renaissance, flag in air. . . .stretched upon the stage in the torchlight, a great caped cloak flung about him, arm raised and eyes rapt as he let the speech flower into the silence of those grotesquely-visaged masquers. Peter Ustinov said of Mab that Scofield spoke it as "a vague elusive nocturne . . . It was a man who didn't like to be referred to as a poet, talking in his sleep." He talked of dreams; but he was not dreaming when his steel flashed upon the Capulets ("Tybalt, you rat-catcher! Will you walk?"). The inflammable young Mercutio had the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword. At his death one knew that light ebbed from the baking moon. It was not an actor's end: a man had died. And a plague on both your houses!