The Rape of Lavinia – Titus Andronicus
2006
Performed in Japanese, this production was by the Ninagawa Company, produced by Horipro Inc and Saitama Arts Foundation in association with Thelma Holt.Photo by Ellie Kurttz.
Wow. That is some powerful stuff.
Lavinia’s rape has always been one of the more horrific scenes in literature for me, and I think it’s because the scene, and the story as a whole, recognizes her as a person and not just a female body that’s the property of a man. What’s done to her forces you to acknowledge her as a person who can feel and communicate (because her ability to communicate is taken away), and then she gets to get some of her own back by participating in the revenge plot. The really notable thing, especially for the 1600s, is that there’s no sense of her being judged for any of it. She’s painted as an upstanding young lady, but when she helps her dad kill people, all the play leaves you thinking is, “Good for you, Lavinia.”
Titus Adronicus has always fascinated me. It’s such a violent story that it’s hard to stomach, but it’s absolutely emotionally raw. It’s a horror story in a way that I’m more used to associating with literature of the 1800s and since; it’s a story about the awful things people do to other people, which wasn’t a favorite subject in that time, and the streamlined plot (simpler and more direct than Shakespeare’s plays usually are) has a modern sensibility to it that makes the human savagery of it accessible and immediate even several hundred years on.
There’s debate as to what period of Shakespeare’s career Titus Andronicus was written in. There’s something jagged and uneven about it, in the writing as well as the story. It feels rough, but it’s hard to be certain whether that’s because it was written by an inexperienced playwright who was still learning how to weave multiple themes and storylines, or if it’s the sign of an experienced writer who knew exactly how to keep his audience off-balance and conjure the visceral, unsettling response he wanted.