Perth’s all-female theatre collective, HIVE (Her Infinite Variety Ensemble) enter their final week of Titus Andronicus which finishes this Saturday. OUTinPerth spoke to Olivia Hogan, who plays Lucius, about Shakespeare’s most violent play.
What is Titus Andronicus about?
It’s pretty much the story of Titus, he is like a warrior. He has been at war forever and he returns to Rome with his son, Lucius, who I play and 21 dead soldiers; some of who are his own sons and also the dead emperor of Rome. So when he returns to Rome, obviously they don’t have a leader so they elect Titus who is not interested and they elect a new emperor; he’s quite a snotty little boy. Because Titus is returning with some [dead] sons, he is quite a traditionalist and he needs to appease the gods for the death of his sons. He believes if he makes a sacrifice of the Queen of the Goths’ son, then his sons can rest in peace. So he sacrifices her son and that’s when all the trouble starts, she is quite a vindictive, awful, revenge-ridden lady. Yeah so it’s pretty much a story of revenge, there’s lots of gore; well, you don’t see any kind of visual gore, it’s alluded to, most of the gore. But yeah, it’s quite nasty what they do to each other.
Titus Andronicus depicts a horrific treatment of women. Why did HIVE select this play, especially since there were only two female characters?
I think that was the point. We’ve identified a lot of shows that have very strong male characters in them and it was thrown around the room as to whether or not there are equal shows out there with gutsy women’s roles. I think the desire for the majority of the actors was that they just wanted to get a juicy role once in their career and largely those were male roles. So I think with Titus, and especially because it is so violent and it’s the most graphically violent of all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, to have an all-female company translate the violence, it kind of put a different spin on it… So the way violence is translated in this show and also the reaction of that violence, I think there is a lot of female nurturing that it’s approached with… Largely to do with the fact that we’re all female, we’ve just got a different interpretation of those awful moments.
This play is said to be the most violent of Shakespeare’s plays. How have audiences dealt with the violence?
This show, particularly I’ve never seen it performed in Perth and I think people are… not ignorant but sheltered from this play because it is not the traditional Romeo & Juliet that you see put on in the park because it’s not something you can take the kids to. I think people have really been captured by the story and I mean yes, it is violent but we have a lot of violence that is alluded to, we don’t have any kind of gratuitous gore on stage, there’s a scene with a hand being chopped off and it’s all stylised. It’s not rammed down people’s throats… and really confronting people like that… A lot of the murders and things like that happen off stage so it’s all part of the storytelling that you don’t necessarily need to ram into people’s faces that this is terribly violent. The audience is clever enough to figure out that that’s something awful…
Check out Titus Andronicus at the Subiaco Arts Centre before it closes on Saturday night: www.bocsticketing.com.au.
Benn Dorrington
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