Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary, by Heiner Müller, translated by Julian Hammond, and directed by Michael Gow. Designed by Robert Kemp, lighting design by Matt Scott, composition and sound design by Brett Collery. With John Bell, Robert Alexander, Thomas Campbell, Peter Cook, Scott Johnson, Nathan Lovejoy, Steven Rooke, Christopher Sommers and Timothy Walter. Bell Shakespeare and Queensland Theatre Company @ the CUB Malthouse until December 6.
Heiner Müller, the defining post-war playwright of the East German stage, understood power. Its machinations were the obsession of his art and his life. It's easy to see why he was so fascinated by Shakespeare who, like Müller, saw theatre and history as two sides of the same coin. He wrote three major adaptations of Shakespeare's work - Macbeth, Hamletmachine and Anatomy Titus - among a slew of other works that grappled with classic texts.
Müller's motives in approaching classical works were never pure, and expressed his intellectual and ideological restlessness, a certain necessary lack of respect. "A classical literature," he said in 1975, "is first of all a literature of a class". Just as his admiration of Brecht turned him into Brecht's most excoriating critic, so he approached the classics in order to subject them to explosive critique. His version of Hamlet was, as Müller said, "the shrunken head of the Hamlet tragedy", splintering Hamlet's subjectivity in order to expose the "something rotten" in contemporary society. And his version of Titus, which cuts the play and interpolates the text with commentary, exposes the blood-soaked, gratuitous violence of contemporary empire.
Shakespeare's original was an early text, heavily influenced by Seneca. It's gore-drenched schlock, so lurid with ultra-violence - rape, mutilation, murder, cannibalism - that the bloodiness becomes ludicrous. Müller's adaptation historicises Shakespeare's splatterfest. In Anatomy Titus, written in the shadow of the CIA-led coup against Chilean president Allende, the exploited colonies of empire - the Germanic Goths and Africa - take their revenge against Rome, even as Rome, decadent and swollen with power, betrays its own.
After the geopolitical adventures of the past decade, its contemporary aptness ought to be obvious. The amorality of power is here written starkly, a text of violence that inscribes itself on the bodies of its victims and leaves in its wake a pile of corpses. There is no lesson to be learned in this violence, no message to be taken (as Müller said - quite honestly I think - in a 1990 interview, "I'm no ideologue. I use Marxism as a material, in the same way I use a Shakespeare play... this becomes form and is valid as such.")
In the same breath, Müller speaks about the absurd obscenity of the first world's treatment of what was then the third world. His insistence that he was only interested in his writing often is taken as cynicism: in fact it is a form of idealism, an aggressive rejection of the contemporary insistence on looking for meaning behind a work, which he thought a sign of decadence. One cannot escape the political critique of Müller's work: at the same time, to think that political critique is the point is to miss the point entirely.
In Müller's Titus, we can't but be aware that the stage violence, however excessive or ludicrous, has literal analogies in the Middle East, in South-East Asia and India, in the mountains of the Caucasus and Pakistan. No playwright's imagination, not even Shakespeare's, outdoes human inventiveness in actual cruelty. But Müller's primary concern was with the politics of artistic form. "Perhaps Godard formulated it best," he said in a 1987 interview. "The task is not to make political movies, but to make movies politically. What is political is the treatment of the material. In other words, it's the form, not the content. That's the problem with young radical movements when they deal with art. What they end up with is philistinism."
Eager revolutionaries aren't the problem in this production, which is rather an exercise in muting Müller's formal radicality. All the same, it's good to see Bell Shakespeare tackling this challenging text, which is a welcome shift from its earlier, shonkily contemporised productions. Julian Hammond's translation, which includes a good deal of the original Shakespeare, is a tough realisation of Müller's savage and excoriating lyricism. (As an aside, it would be interesting to know whether Müller's play translated Shakespeare's English into contemporary German, or left it in a pastiche of, as it were, Elizabethan German - each would have a very different effect). But you have to listen hard to hear the language through the noise of Michael Gow's production.
Watching this very uneven show, I often felt as if I were witnessing a copy of something, a production that goes half-way. It is as if it begins with the best of intentions, only to waver at the sticking point: it has its moments, but they founder beneath a wider formal uncertainty. When you enter the theatre, the stylistic language looks promising enough: Robert Kemp's set is a simple box, white walls smeared with red. Back stage is a wall topped with books, the intellectual fruit of civilisation, which will be torn and besmirched with blood, and in the centre is an industrial barrel which, we soon find out, is full of gore. The all-male cast is dressed in contemporary casual clothes and, as with Dood Paard's meta-theatrical adaptation of Titus at last year's Melbourne Festival, assign each other their different roles.
Even though I know the play quite well, I found the first ten minutes deeply confusing. Müller dispenses with the first act, replacing it with a bald summary of events, but this is rushed through in the telling. I was so busy keeping up with the chorus work that nothing fixed in my mind. Once I'd sorted out the plot, I still had problems negotiating a mish-mash of theatrical intentions. If the production is so stripped back, why have herald's trumpets suddenly ringing out in isolated scenes? Wherefore lighting changes that transform the naked stage into more conventional theatrical spaces? Why does the Emperor (Nathan Lovejoy) sound like someone from Monty Python's Life of Brian?
There's no doubt (believe it or not) that Müller is funny. His humour is, however, blacker than the inside of a cat, corrosive and subversive. He's a specialist in the kind of laughter that arises from a literal apprehension of catastrophe, from the felt knowledge that there are wounds beyond the help of therapy or redemption. He would be the first to reject a holy reverence towards his texts. All the same, I find it very difficult to think of his work as camp.
But an undeniable campness runs through this production, from the Emperor's lisp to Lavinia's lipsticked pouts. Peter Cook's portrayal of the vengeful Goth queen Tamora, on the other hand, doesn't press so hard on gendered stereotypes, and is the more effective for it. I'm not sure why the decision to have an all-male cast should result in such posturings: one reason given, which suggests some of the problems in the direction, is that the rape and mutilation of Lavinia (Thomas Campbell) is less hard to take if she is played by a man. A major effect is to empty the play of its dark lusts; they become a joke, merely an exercise in pushing the boundaries of taste.
The treatment of the African slave Aaron (a bravura performance by Timothy Walter) pierces through the camp to something more interesting. It is played in crude blackface: when we first see Walker, he is wearing a gorilla mask, and the racial representations become successively more outrageous. Aaron's baby is even represented by a gollywog. Shakespeare's play is nakedly racist, and in this production it's amplified to acute discomfort.
However, even here the effect draws back from reflection on its larger implications - the wealthy world's exploitation of Africa, which is driven in its abjection to nihilistic revenge - to a more personally-sized racism. The action is divorced from its larger political implications and historical context - the very aspects highlighted in Müller's text - and the disturbance stirred by the racism becomes that much more manageable.
The cast, as so often in Bell Shakespeare productions, is uneven; and this text, even more than conventional Shakespeare, demands actors who can deal with complex language. This perhaps accounts in part for my feeling in many scenes that I couldn't quite grasp the words. John Bell plays Titus, and for the first third stalks around the stage as stiff as a board. Once Titus goes crazy, you begin to see why Bell is so respected as a Shakespearean actor: he eats up the role with gluttonous relish.
But all this beautiful language led me back to wondering why, if "poetry is murder", as Müller claims in the play, we have so much lovely enunciation of it. It's as if its beauty remains, at the core, an unquestioned good. I found myself longing for the language to be somehow assaulted in the performances, rather than preserved intact in the midst of mayhem.
In short, Anatomy Titus seems neither one thing nor 'tother. It's caught uncomfortably between radicality and convention, and ultimately blurs to something uncomfortably close to jolly japes about mutilation. In the chaos of gesture, Müller's formal inquiry is obscured, reduced to the merely sensational: punches are pulled everywhere.
It's Gow's misfortune to have mounted this play hard on the heels of Barrie Kosky's potent evocation of Greek tragedy in The Trojan Women, and with Dood Paard's brilliant and funny realisation of Titus still in recent memory. For all their different approaches, both the earlier productions were exemplary in their wrought simplicity, in how each production employed only the elements that were necessary to its purpose. What emerged was a burnished lucidity, a deep lustre in which the original text burned with renewed relevance. The most crucial lack in this production of Anatomy Titus is a concomitant sense of artistic necessity.
Picture: John Bell as Titus in Anatomy Titus.
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