The Guardian’s “history” piece today is the review from 1957 of Titus Andronicus, “given performance tonight for the first time in Stratford-on-Avon’s history”.
Peter Brook, who is responsible for sound, for stage pictures and for direction, has produced the play with dazzling simplicity out of a terrifying tawny darkness. The horrors were not laid on crudely. There was little running gore, and only the lopping of Titus’s hand is really sickening.
But the murderous spirit of the piece is marvellously caught with the shadows and the harsh shapes. Sir Laurence Olivier begins the much-wronged Titus on an almost jovial note, then rising like an Elizabethan Oedipus to the scene where, confronted with his lopped and ravished daughter Lavinia, he has his own hand amputated, and going on superbly through the scenes of feigned madness to the final Feast.
I struggle to see Olivier as Titus, but perhaps that is a failure of my imagination.
(My review of the recent Globe show.)
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