So there are a couple of things I’ve been meaning to write about, but for today I’m going to focus on the most recent event (not to mention the one most relevant to my career): last night’s field trip to the National Theatre’s production of Titus Andronicus.

If you don’t know Titus, here are the very basic facts: Titus is a Roman general with a ton of sons and one daughter. He just conquered the Goths and brought some of them home as party favors, including one that he sacrifices. He helps elect the young Saturninus as emperor of Rome. Saturninus marries Tamora, the captive queen of the Goths, and the two of them — with a little help from Tamora’s bit-on-the-side, Aaron the Moor — proceed to systematically ruin Titus’ life, at which point Titus turns around and systematically ruins theirs right back. Everyone ends up dead.

Yes, this is the play with the chick who gets her hands and tongue cut off. Julie Taymor did a movie version with an all-star cast that was remarkably free of giant puppets: Anthony Hopkins (aka Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs) as Titus, Alan Cumming (aka the Emcee, Cabaret, and Nightcrawler, X-Men 2) as Saturninus, Harry Lennix (aka Boyd, Dollhouse) as Aaron . . . The movie is definitely worth a watch, if you’re ever in the mood for Shakespeare and Quentin Tarantino-levels of gore at the same time, although a lot of people find Taymor’s style off-putting. (Here’s Lavinia writing the names of her rapists in the sand, where Taymor really gets crazy psychedelic.)

I’m harping on Taymor a little because I felt like there was a lot of it in the production we saw last night.

Tamora (Maria Kechagioglou) and Saturninus (Kostas Vasardanis).

Which is understandable. Some movies cast a long shadow — Olivier’s Richard III, Zeffirelli and Luhrmann’s version of Romeo and Juliet — especially with lesser-produced works like Titus. And Taymor’s version does some very interesting things with highly stylized violence and comedy that the National Theatre’s production seemed to be trying to play with as well.

There’s a way to use broad performances, physical comedy, and stylization with tragedy and have it work. Revenge tragedies like Titus lend themselves especially well to this, because the amount of blood spilt becomes almost farcical. The 2003 Alex Cox version of Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy does that particularly well, for instance, and Taymor’s Titus does a fair amount of it as well. The problem is that if you’re going to take that route, you have to commit to it.

The National Theatre’s Titus couldn’t decide whether it was taking itself seriously or not. It opened with a really beautiful and really promising tableaux: A long table dominated center stage, covered in red flowers, while microphones on stands stood downstage just left and right of center, framing the table. Downstage left stood a TV with tape over the screen, silently playing something that looked like Gladiator or Spartacus, something violent and Roman. When the cast entered — the Andronicae and Bassianus in white suits, Saturninus and the Goths in black — they laughed and talked with each other, approached the table, and all lifted glasses of red liquid in a toast. (Saturninus looked wry, Tamora looked bitter, Bassianus and Lavinia glowed with earnestness.) Moments later a fight broke out between the brothers Saturninus and Bassianus, and they strode downstage to the microphones to start lambasting each other and proclaim their superiority for the throne.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long after that for things to start falling apart. Demetrius and Chiron were caricatures, but they were nothing compared to the way Aaron was chewing the scenery. Tamora’s action through the whole play was “to vamp in uncomfortably tight pants.” Aaron left toothmarks on the scenery — not literally, but it was close in a few moments. By contrast, Lavinia became dumbly passive long before her tongue was cut out. Lucius ended up in a suit of armor doing robotic semaphore-like moves while people in masks hissed and growled into the microphones for ten minutes. Titus yelled a lot, never returning to the dignity he showed at the opening of the play — and only getting worse as he went mad.

Overall, the second act took the absurdist, near-comedic route, with little apparent connection to the first act.

Aaron with his baby (Kostas Falelakis) threatens the Nurse (Panagiotis Katsolis) with Demetrius and Chiron (Petros Malamas and Ilias Kounelas) for backup.

I liked the aesthetic a lot on the whole — Lavinia in particular looked like she’d escaped from a Dresden Dolls album —

But with less tongue.

But there was a lot of unnecessary stuff. One of my notes is “Why are there seagulls?” because there were six taxidermy seagulls sitting in the down left corner of the stage — never referred to, never interacted with, just hanging out giving the whole affair a faintly Wild Dada Ducks air. Nooses descended from the flies during Titus’ “Tell the stones my sorrows” speech, when he’s pleading for the lives of two of his sons, which would have  worked just fine as an indicator of the gallows atmosphere without the plastic mannequin hanging from one of them, thanks. People donned masks, sometimes to make the double-casting work but just as often for no apparent reason except to make themselves look creepy.

And don’t get me started on the sound design. Underscoring music ran through much of the play, much too loud and much too repetitively to be anything but annoying. One or two scenes had me wanting to cover my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear Carmina Burana any more.

What I do find intersting, I have to say, is how much of the performance I feel able to critique even with the language barrier. I will give the cast credit for that: anyone with a decent grasp of the plot’s complexities could follow the show, because the physical actions onstage made what was happening clear. It reminded me a little of the gibberish exercises we did in Acting I last semester, where we had to tell a joke or play a scene without the benefit of the text to lean on. It forces you to physicalize, to use your voice dynamically to get your point across.

The other moment that drove home to me that this was not an American production was Aaron’s first entrance. He knelt in a spotlight, talking about his own blackness — and pulled out a stick of black makeup and painted his face. It would be an act of audacity in America, but there’s no cultural history of blackface here. It doesn’t ring the same way.

I am, overall, glad I went — but I’m glad I’m going to a more conventional show tonight. I have a ticket to Shakespeare’s Villains, although with the buses and metro off-line due to today’s strikes, I’m going to have to take a cab. Which ought not make me more nervous than taking public transit, but somehow it does; maybe it has something to do with the fact that we had an argument with our cab driver last night. (“You can’t have five people in a cab.” “Ksero. Kseroume. [I know. We know.]” “[Greek]–” “Signomi. Ksero poli ligo ellinika. [I’m sorry. I know very little Greek.]” “If you know it is only four people in a taxi, why do you try to fit five!” “Katalaveno. Tora. [I understand. Now.]”)