A Zombie Titus Andronicus: Blanche McIntyre’s 2017 RSC Production and Performance History

Shakespeare productions in Summer 2017 provided several surprises. At the close of Robert Icke’s Hamlet, Andrew Scott delivered Hamlet’s final words, “The rest is silence,” but then rolled on the floor groaning in pain, thereby providing one of the few times in my playgoing experience that an actor responded to the “O, o, o, o” that follows this famous line in the First Folio.[1] What came next was even more distinctive. Each of the four onstage dead figures arose and walked through a central door attended by the Ghost (David Rintoul) to join their awaiting families. As a playgoer I connected this welcoming figure to “this fell sergeant, Death” who “Is strict in his arrest” (336-37), though that may not be what the director had in mind.

A wealth of information is available about the performance history of Hamlet, but my focus is on the less often performed Titus Andronicus, and, more specifically, on the link between some inventive choices in Blanche McIntyre’s 2017 RSC modern dress production and what we know about previous stagings.[2]

Some of those choices will come as no surprise to playgoers accustomed to transpositions of a Shakespeare play into a modern setting. In 1.1 Saturninus (Martin Hudson) grabbed a microphone at any opportunity to advance his cause; before all the horrors to come, the Andronicus family posed for a group selfie; and here and later (3.1, 5.3) a camera-woman tracked major events. Modern weaponry was introduced: in 1.1 Mutius used his…