Nehad Selaiha encounters a blood bath at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Unless deliberately staged as a hilarious parody of the kind of gross revenge drama initiated by the Roman Seneca and sedulously aped by many Elizabethan writers, Titus Andronicus is not a play any sane person would want to watch nowadays or find easy to stomach. T S Eliot called it "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written", while others, including Dr Johnson, Hazlitt and Coleridge, denied Shakespeare's authorship of most of the text or tried to absolve him completely of any complicity in it. Sadly, however, since it was included in the 1623 Folio collection of the plays by Heminges and Condell, two of Shakespeare's closest friends and professional colleagues for over 20 years, and in view of strong counter arguments by other scholars and commentators, one is reluctantly persuaded to accredit it the Bard. Assuming it is Shakespeare's, as Peter Brook did when he staged it at Stratford during the 1955-56 season -- in his "theatre of cruelty" phase -- (with Laurence Olivier in the title role), one has to face the fact that of his 37 plays it is the crudest, goriest and most abhorrently violent. Its slaughterhouse atmosphere and abundant horrors -- "almost comically frequent", as someone observed -- might have delighted the Elizabethan groundlings and drawn them in hordes; but to a modern audience, unless it is looking for cheap thrills and chills, it would probably seem a silly blood-and-thunder old shocker, crammed full of unnatural deeds, with next to no saving graces in terms of characterisation, style or ethos. Brook's production, as one critic, Richard David, noted in 1957 was so calculatedly shocking it "sent some spectators off into faints before ever a throat was cut". Its final effect, however, as he admits, "was a conviction, unsought but growing irresistibly as the play proceeded, that this piece on which so much labour and ingenuity had been lavished ... was twaddle". Twaddle or grotesque melodrama, the play unfolds as a string of gratuitous sensational incidents, among them adultery, multiple rape coupled with savage maiming, the repeated severing of heads and lopping off of limbs, an attempted infanticide, the killing of a son and daughter by their father and murders galore. There are also scenes of madness where the hero raves and rants and, for good measure, this gruesome farce ends with a horrible banquet in which a mother feeds on the zealously baked and carefully-garnished flesh of her two sons. The characters involved in these nauseating proceedings are either exulting human devils or weeping, puppet-like victims, and despite all their glib talk of nobility and honour, the system of moral values which governs their world is based on brute force, martial prowess and primitive blood rituals. Even the nominal protagonist is a mere stereotype, and not an attractive one. Titus is the most unsympathetic hero Shakespeare ever loosed on the audience and set to strut and fret on the boards -- a rigid, irascible old warrior, pompously jingoistic and barbarously cruel. In the first scene he boasts that out of the 25 sons he has fathered, 22 were sacrificed for the military glory of Rome (think of their poor mother), and before the scene is out he has had a war prisoner killed in front of his mother (the captive queen of the Goths, Tamora) in a brutal religious ritual (an act which she rightly describes as "cruel, irreligious piety") and stabbed to death one of his remaining three sons because he dared oppose his will. Not to mention his putting a villain on the throne of Rome out of blind subservience to tradition and handing over to him his only daughter against her will and despite the fact that she is betrothed to another. Such a character deserves what he gets, and he gets ruthless, vengeful Tamora and her vicious lover Aaron who are equally grotesque. None of the characters -- not even the raped, maimed Lavinia -- arouses so much as a shred of sympathy and, in the reading, as the enormities and atrocities pile up, the text becomes progressively ludicrous and intolerably boring. Why should anyone, especially a talented, intelligent young director like Mohamed Abul-Sood, bother to stage Titus Andronicus when other far superior Shakespearean texts, like The Tempest, Twelfth Night, or Much Ado About Nothing still await their Egyptian premiere? His recent production at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, an adapted version of the text in nine scenes, rechristened Rabee' El-Dam (Spring of Blood), spelt the answer forcefully in every detail -- in the set, the costumes, the props and the haunting soundtrack, all of which he designed. Seating his small audience on the spacious stage of one of the big theatres at the Bibliotheca and using it as both performance space and auditorium, he literally took them behind the scenes, casting them in the role of colluders in the action rather than witnesses or casual spectators. Apart from two sloping ramps, bordered with dead trees which bounded the audience on either side, the basic structure of the stage itself, its bare walls, two columns at the back and metal fixtures -- the service-ladders on the sides of the proscenium arch, the catwalks and grids connecting them on top, the spotlight rails, the space up in the flies and the huge sliding door which leads backstage (normally screened off and used for entrances and exits and to let in the sets) -- constituted the set. This created a composite, multidimensional performance space which allowed Abul-Sood to deploy the action around the audience and, indeed, above their heads. At no point were you allowed to rest your gaze in one direction, but had to be looking everywhere, far and near, up and down and sideways all the time. One minute the actors would be scampering up and down a service ladder, clattering across a catwalk or hollering at you from somewhere up in the flies; another, you would find them running up and down the ramps on your side or, literally, under your feet, writhing in agony, screaming for help, or crouching to hide; and when the black, forbidding door at the back opened, you could glimpse in the distance, through the darkened hall behind it, shadowy figures materialising on the open terrace at its far end, as if from the dark sky outside, and advancing towards you. As the sights and sounds assailed you from all directions, all at once, and the short, crisp scenes cascaded, you felt besieged, engulfed in a dizzying whirlpool of blood and violence, and the mounting sense of entrapment generated a crescendo of anxiety, agitation and even terror. Abul-Sood's manipulation of his few, carefully chosen props (including two small wicker cages with live, cooing pigeons inside, suspended from the flies, corresponding with Lavinia imprisoned in a wheel chair and ironically contrasting with the rampant savagery underneath) was equally imaginative and versatile. Tamora's man-size wooden cage, in which she is carried in as war prisoner, another ironical correspondence, could become a fence or a table with a stretcher serving as its top. Planted in a particular situation, a simple, familiar object could become a heightened symbol or a poignant, concrete metaphor. A stunning, unforgettable instance of this kind of transformation occurred in the scene of the rape and mutilation of Lavinia (superbly played by Nirmeen Hassan El-Bureedi) by Tamora's two sons (Ziad Youssef and Ahmed Abdallah). Exquisitely choreographed around the space, in an eerie play of light and shadow, with blood-curdling music and sound-effects rising and falling in the background, it ends with Lavinia dragged behind one of the ramps; though her body is pulled down and disappears, her hands, soon to be lopped off, remain in view, spotlit, desperately clutching at the edge and her face pops up twice, twisted in a terrible silent scream. When she emerges in a tattered slip, handless, with "a crimson river of warm blood,/ Like to a bubbling fountain", as her father would later say, gushing between "her rosed lips", one of the rapists disappears for a minute and comes back with a large metal rubbish bin on wheels, opens the lid, helps the other to stuff her twisted, broken body into it, then closes the lid and wheels her off stage, as if to a rubbish dump. Though the image of a human being in a rubbish bin has been used before on stage, by Beckett, for instance, in Endgame, here the timing of it was so profoundly shocking that I think I shall never again look at a rubbish bin without remembering this scene. But more than anything else the choice of modern dress was crucial to the kind of impact Abul-Sood wanted his production to make. As the actors stormed in, the soldiers in modern combat uniform, the citizens in black jeans and coats, the new emperor, Saturninus, in an elegant white suit with a red bow and the future empress, Tamora, in a red evening dress, the setting was suddenly transposed from imperial Rome to war-ravaged Iraq, its recent military dictatorship and current foreign invasion. From that moment on the play took on a new significance, gaining tremendous immediacy and relevance. It would be fruitless, however, to seek in this production easy equations or clear equivalencies between fictional and real places and characters. Abul-Sood is too sophisticated an artist to allow that and Iraq is here evoked not as a specific place or situation, but as a tragic human experience that can happen anywhere. Abul-Sood doesn't use the stage, as many have done before him, as a political forum to criticise, satirise, preach an ideology or make an argument but, rather, to protest his anger against the world, to hold up a mirror to it and show it its ugly face, to create images that body forth his passionate response to its growing militarism, jingoism, injustice and gratuitous cruelty. When asked three years ago why he was doing Edward Bond's harrowing Lear at Al- Hanager, he answered: "With all the suffering and bloodshed in the world around us, it is the only play I feel I can do right now." Well the world has not changed since except, if anything, for the worse. I suppose this is why Abul-Sood decided to create his own version of Titus Andronicus now just as Bond had done with Shakespeare's King Lear many years ago. In Abul-Sood's version, Titus (Mohamed Farouk) becomes a lame, bandaged, old soldier, coming back from battle more broken than victorious, leaning on a crutch and too frail to bluster the way Shakespeare's hero did. This significant toning down was essential for Abul-Sood's apocalyptic vision and modern frame of reference and is vastly different from the handling of the character in Brook's 1950s production. In it, according to Richard David, the original temporal setting of the play was kept and the set "richly suggested the civilised barbarity of late imperial Rome". In the hands of Olivier, David notes, Titus came across as "a Great man, cantankerous, choleric, and at the same time compelling". Farouk couldn't have matched Olivier if he tried; fortunately Abul-Sood didn't want him to. A less muted Titus would not have fitted in with the new version of emperor Saturninus (played with delightful comic verve by Wael El-Alian as a slightly crazed, clownish ruler, given to screaming hilarious speeches in colloquial Arabic), the new Aaron (a woman in drag suavely played by Sarah Medhat), or Silvia Jan's new Tamora who, still dangerously seductive and powerful, was too sophisticated and modern to pretend to Titus, as her original counterpart did (in Act 5, scene 2), that she was "Revenge, sent from the infernal kingdom." Spring of Blood would not have seen the light without the support of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the head of its Arts Centre, composer and maestro Sherif Mohieddin and the director of the theatre programme there, Mahmoud Abu Doma, himself a gifted director. In Egypt it takes people of courage and special calibre to sponsor an independent artist, working outside mainstream professional theatre, and a daring, iconoclastic one at that. Most of Abul-Sood's previous work was staged at Al- Hanager -- a place known for championing new talent and taking risks. Luckily for him this time, the Bibliotheca decided to have its own resident theatre troupe and invited him to launch it, as he had successfully done with his own independent group, Shrapnel in 1992, when he was only 21. With Mohamed Farouk, a core-member of Shrapnel, as executive director, they auditioned hopeful actors and chose 12. After 10 days of general technical training and cultural grooming they started working on the text, exploring it, relating to it, practicing doubling and trebling in parts, writing their ideas and feelings about the play and doing endless improvisations. A lot of their work went into the production and a lot went out; but the end result was more than rewarding, and not just for them. The Bibliotheca is proud of its new troupe and we, the audience, have had a stirring and memorable theatrical experience. A female acquaintance told me as we left the theatre that they should have tested the blood pressure of people before letting them in and that she felt as if she had been to Iraq and back. Can you beat that for a compliment?
