Vengeance Is Theirs | James Romm
As if to counterweight the gentle, tender-hearted Shakespeare of the film Hamnet, now the brutal and bloody Titus Andronicus has arrived in New York, in an impressive Red Bull Theater production. A content advisory provided by Red Bull lists the kind of material to which the play exposes us: “violence, sexual violence, murder, mutilation, racism, grief, revenge, and harm involving a child.” A complete inventory would also include the consumption of human flesh: at the play’s climax two of its villains, a Gothic queen named Tamora and the Roman emperor Saturninus, are made to unknowingly eat Tamora’s sons in the form of a mincemeat pie. The toxic soil from which all these horrors spring, as the Red Bull production makes clear, is a disordered Roman state, redeemed neither by those who try to uphold its traditions nor by those who violate them. Titus Andronicus is rarely seen on the stage, in part due to the traumas it can inflict on an audience. The most notable modern version, directed by Peter Brook in 1955 and starring …
