"Titus Andronicus" is almost the most neglected play under Shakespeare's reputation. Some people even refuse to admit that it was written by Shakespeare, and it has almost never been put on the stage after the seventeenth century. On the contrary, in the last century, the play became unexpectedly lively. In 1923, the British Old Vic troupe put on the play in order to stage the complete works of Shakespeare. Zhong Nai Nei fell to the ground one by one and died, all of them couldn't help laughing. In 1955, Peter Brook invited Laurence Oliver, Vivien Leigh and other big names to perform this play. On the one hand, the British Shakespeare Theatre wanted to once again create a glorious record of performing all Shakespeare plays with one troupe. On the other hand, it was also the ultimate in the play. Cruelty attracts the director to experiment with the ideal of brutal theater.
How cruel and weird is this drama? Watch these episodes: The two sons of the Gothic queen Tamora raped Lavinia, the daughter of Titus, and cut off Lavinia's tongue so that she could not speak, cut off her hands so that she could not write, and A branch is inserted in a severed limb; Titus finally gets a chance for revenge, and after draining the blood of Tamora's son, he treats Tamora's flesh with a feast...
How crazy, Shakespeare's first Roman tragedy, ever The optimism and clarity gradually faded away, but after all, he is still young, even the hatred is so full of blood, and the gloomy grief and anger that has not had time to settle and decorate, is paved with magnificent blood on the stage. This frenzy, this distortion, is at the mercy of the film industry at the end of the last century.
In 1999, Broadway female director Julie Taymor put this script on the screen. In the fragrance of the flesh, there are many conspiracies - the evil of the human heart, so dark that there is no light. Actors dressed in modern clothes shuttled through the props with a sense of installation. In motorcycles, firearms, refrigerators, walkmans, pool tables, microphones, and Pepsi, the cruelty had the color of carnival. Lavinia, who had her tongue cut off and her hands chopped off, turned around, her white clothes fluttering, and once she opened her mouth, she saw blood gushing out - this scene is so beautiful, the suffering Lavinia is more beautiful than the previous Lavinia. Mei, do you believe that the director did not intend to achieve this violent aesthetics? Seeing me, I couldn't help but smile.
Everyone has a black spring in their hearts, and there is no evil to blame, because it is nurtured by everyone's hearts, just like a crow nurtured in the night - this is probably the vague theme of many contemporary avant-garde movies. No wonder Shakespeare's play was rehabilitated in this era. The film industry with hundreds of millions of tons of blood plasma has become the spiritual food of our contemporary people. The more cruel it is, the more beautiful it is.
I heard that if a person commits suicide by jumping off a building, he will lose consciousness in the process of falling, in order to meet the pain at the moment of hitting the ground in ignorance-in 1923, in the audience of the British Old Vic Theatre Company, such laughter was loud Maybe that's the point. It's too bloody, so laugh, we greeted the blood on the screen again and again with laughter, previewing again and again, in order to let ourselves be anesthetized at the moment of realization.
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