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Titus Andronicus last night was as fantastic as I'd hoped. Managed to get up against the stage and thus peer up into the face of Indira Varma, nearly get kicked in the face several times, and get smoke machine smoke pumped through my legs. Also managed to get fake blooded, have water thrown all over me, and be shoved back and forth by all the action that went through the audience.
What I really appreciate about this staging (the same as the 2006 one) is that they go out of their way to make it overwhelming. The gore and misery is played repeatedly for black laughs; there is of course a great deal of cast/audience interaction, but there are many occasions where all the action would in a different staging have been confined to the stage, and here it is shoved through the crowd. People fall into the crowd, run through it, barge the crowd out of the way like plebians to shove great towers through, the cast emerge from under the stage and scare the living daylights out of the audience, there is a procession of burning torches with beating drums and billowing smoke... smoke engulfs the audience repeatedly, there are braziers going all the time full of frankincense (which has a mild antidepressant effect, chemically) and the roof is closed over to make it more claustrophobic: there is repeated confetti, rains of petals, a hunt where the audience are used as trees, one audience member was pulled into a dance, the audience were the "dread pit"... you are INVOLVED, heavily, in all of the action.
It is a solid manifesto on what theatre can do that cinema can't, and all of your senses are involved. You can feel the wind of the actors passing. Get the blood on your face. And in many aspects it also feels authentically both Elizabethan and Roman at the same time, because of the immediacy of the violence, fire, smoke, smells, blood, noise - and the chaos and carnage.
(It also reminded me of the festivals I used to go to around this time of year as a wee child, which might be why I enjoy it SO MUCH).
Also met new people, which I think I enjoyed more than Jess did. Everyone was terribly excited and I'm not sure that brought out the best all over.
T-shirt t-shirt, pattern, pattern.
Titus Andronicus last night was as fantastic as I'd hoped. Managed to get up against the stage and thus peer up into the face of Indira Varma, nearly get kicked in the face several times, and get smoke machine smoke pumped through my legs. Also managed to get fake blooded, have water thrown all over me, and be shoved back and forth by all the action that went through the audience.
What I really appreciate about this staging (the same as the 2006 one) is that they go out of their way to make it overwhelming. The gore and misery is played repeatedly for black laughs; there is of course a great deal of cast/audience interaction, but there are many occasions where all the action would in a different staging have been confined to the stage, and here it is shoved through the crowd. People fall into the crowd, run through it, barge the crowd out of the way like plebians to shove great towers through, the cast emerge from under the stage and scare the living daylights out of the audience, there is a procession of burning torches with beating drums and billowing smoke... smoke engulfs the audience repeatedly, there are braziers going all the time full of frankincense (which has a mild antidepressant effect, chemically) and the roof is closed over to make it more claustrophobic: there is repeated confetti, rains of petals, a hunt where the audience are used as trees, one audience member was pulled into a dance, the audience were the "dread pit"... you are INVOLVED, heavily, in all of the action.
It is a solid manifesto on what theatre can do that cinema can't, and all of your senses are involved. You can feel the wind of the actors passing. Get the blood on your face. And in many aspects it also feels authentically both Elizabethan and Roman at the same time, because of the immediacy of the violence, fire, smoke, smells, blood, noise - and the chaos and carnage.
(It also reminded me of the festivals I used to go to around this time of year as a wee child, which might be why I enjoy it SO MUCH).
Also met new people, which I think I enjoyed more than Jess did. Everyone was terribly excited and I'm not sure that brought out the best all over.