Abraham Rogatnick's Pancho

The English production of Titus Andronicus that I attended was Peter Brook’s abstractly stylized presentation in 1955, which at least had the virtue of keeping the gore at a symbolic distance, though at the expense of Shakespeare’s parodistic excess. I don’t think I would see the play again unless Mel Brooks directed it, with his company of zanies, or it perhaps could yet be made into a musical.

Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human – Harold Bloom

I never go to see a Shakespeare play without first consulting Harold Bloom’s bible.

Going yesterday with my Rosemary to the opening of the Cultch and Rumble Theatre Production of Colleen Murphy’s The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius was no exception.

There were so many associations in my mind when I saw this play that the only term I could use to categorize what I saw was French-born Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s coinage “lo real maravilloso”. 

While many identify his and other Latin American literature as magic realism I prefer Carpentier’s. What transported me into Carpentier territory was the expression I heard, “yearning for Mussolini”. That this and another “I will prevent your children from being run over by a car” happened within a play set at the final days of the Roman Empire did not make me waver from this association. Carpentier always avoided making time linear.

It was impossible for me to watch the detrioration into unspeakable and most gory violence of Titus Bouffonius directed by the straight-laced exquisitely suited Stephen Drover without re-reading from Alejo Carpentier’s 1974 novella Concierto Barroco.

In this delightful work a Mexican silver potentate dressed as Moctezuma (Venetian carnival) in the 18^th century runs into the red priest (Vivaldi) a Saxon (Handel) and a Neapolitan (Domenico Scarlatti) at a café. The four and the Mexican’s black servant decide to escape the noise and have a picnic on the Venetian island cemetery. There they find Igor Stravinski’s grave (he died elsewhere but is buried in Venice while Wagner died in Venice and is buried elsewhere). The five men discuss opera and English theatre:

‘Don’t talk to me of theatre in England,’ said Antonio. ‘The British ambassador…’

‘A good friend of mine, ‘interjected the Saxon.

‘…the British ambassador has described to me several plays being put in London, and they are horrifying. Things the like of which are not to be seen even in quacksalvers’ shacks, magic lanterns, or those broadsides peddled by the blind…’

And in the rising dawn that blanched the cemetery, there followed an account of butchery, ghosts, and murdered children: one whose two eyes were gouged out in plain view of the public by a duke of Cornwall who threw them on the floor and stomped them with his heels in the manner of a Spanish fandango dancer; a Roman General’s daughter whose tongue was torn out and both hands cut off after she had been raped, all of it ending in a banquet at which the offended father, left one-armed after a hatchet blow from his wife’s lover, disguises himself as a cook and gives a queen of the Goths a pie to eat stuffed with the flesh of her two children, bled shortly like pigs on the eve of village wedding…

‘How hideous!’ exclaimed the Saxon.

‘And the worst of it was that he used the flesh of their faces – noses, ears, and necks – in the pie, as recommended for pieces of fine game in treatises on the art of carving…’
Concierto Barroco - Alejo Carpentier - Translated by Asa Zatz

The five performers of Titus Bouffonius are excellent but two stood out for me. The Quixotic Peter Anderson made me hope he plays Lear before I die and Pippa Mackie really stole the play. 

 Attempting to talk minus a tongue was a tour-de-force of an actor’s pre-diction talents.

A June production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in New York City’s Central Park was seen as an attack on President Donald Trump by the right-wing media. I have no doubt in my mind that this Titus Bouffonius (more subtle, incredibly!) would have been attacked as well.

While there were things said like “fake news” and such this play with its descent into bad, to worse, to a lot worse (in the violence and gore) to me was a parallel to the Trump White House in which when you think it has hit a rock-bottom depravity it all gets worse on the next day.

My Rosemary who says little but well told me, “This play could only have been seen in the Cultch.”

I do not believe that the woman who was sitting next to me with beautiful décolletage and fishnets could have heard. But I did tell her (Heather Redfern the Cultch Executive Director), “Any woman who wears fishnets to me can never do wrong.” And her choices for plays for our sometimes moribund theatre milieu are always invigorating.

Nicola Cavendish

My review of this play does not end here as I shared some warm conversation with actress (her choice of word) Nicola Cavendish who is a friend of playwright Colleen Murphy and was desperately trying to find out from the program who had designed the set (the closest I got was Production Designer –Drew Facey)

Some years ago I went to PAL with my friend, architect Abraham Rogatnick to a production of Shirley Valentine in which Cavendish played the lead. Extra officially Rogatnick told me Cavendish was going blind. I asked Cavendish who told me that one of her eyes at the time was gone but that after two operations she is back to having exceptional eyesight. I can attest to this as she looked at me almost as if she had x-ray eyes.

Cavendish had smiles of anticipation before the show began and her smiles had not faded in the least after.

Rosemary and I did not stay to indulge in the soiree. We looked at the canapés that featured little red dabs and could only think of all that ketchup that was squeezed and poured during the performance. Our loss of appetite was complete.

How Pippa Mackie as the raped Lavinia indicates the names of her assailants is beyond anything that I could possibly describe here with any subtlety. I will not and I will leave it to those who have the guts and resolve to see this most important play that they attend with an empty stomach.