It has been often
said that Shakespeare, with Titus
Andronicus, had a Tarantino phase, but did Tarantino have a Shakespeare
phase? This production, presented by Russall S. Beattie and playing for four
(k)nights at Newtown
The story, as in Tarantino’s
film, remain intact, so too do the ‘Dogs,’ styled here as bandit knights,
perfect strangers to one another, hired to rob a casket of precious jewels from
a coach on its way to the King. When their heist is thwarted, it becomes
apparent that one of them must be an officer in disguise. The six knights – Sirs
Blue, Orange, Brown, Blonde, Pink, and White – are here a motley collection of swaggering
fellows, clad in leather doublet jackets, breeches, and boots, wearing daggers
at their belts, with temperaments as roguish as their deeds. Along with Lord
Joseph, Pleasant-Fellow Edward, Holdaway and an Officer, Hopley expertly adapts
Tarantino’s chamber-ensemble into a sweaty and heady concoction of revenge,
best served cold.
The cast here are
all terrific, and while there is often a temptation to overplay scenes towards
a certain theatrical campness, in other words a parody of Tarantino’s blood-soaked
word-drunk style, Hopley never lets the dogs off the leash for too long, and it’s
not hard to see the cast having an absolute ball out there. Richard Hilliar spends
much of his time on the ground as Sir Orange, both in flashback and in the
present, but also enacts a memorable rendition of his story-swatting scene with
Jerry Retford as Holdaway providing Hamlet’s advice to the players – “Speak the
speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue…” Chris
Miller, as Sir White, has a Nick Cave-like swagger to him, and exudes a cool
and bravado which perhaps conceals the fact his character is perhaps flying by
the seat of his pants much of the time. Leof Kingsford-Smith’s Lord Joseph is by
turns menacing and genial, and you’re never sure how he’s going to react to a
situation. Anthony Campanella’s Pleasant-Fellow Edward, resplendent in crimson doublet-and-hose,
has a glorious moment when he sees Sir Orange unconscious on the ground, a
soliloquy which rivals anything Hamlet himself delivered. There’s an
undisguised menace and sadistic glee in Lukasz Embart’s Sir Blonde, there for
all to see when he cuts Sir Blue’s (Patrick Magee) ear off, and holds it aloft,
proclaiming “Lend me your ear!” Diego Armelo’s Sir Pink is perhaps the one who
seems to be most noticeably acting but he, too, is having a ball so it doesn’t
really distract from the effect. And Dominic Santangelo, as Key William, providing
live accompaniment to the action on a ukulele (as well as the obligatory
cross-dressing scene) is a brilliant touch, as are the Elizabethanised lyrics,
still (incredibly) set to their original tunes.
The Vanguard here is well suited to the production, a bit like an Elizabethan
indoor theatre, albeit with the audience’s positions inverted: at the front,
the ‘rich’ dinner-eating folk, while upstairs on the mezzanine gallery, the ‘groundlings’
laugh, cheer and applaud heartily and with gusto, appreciating the in-jokes and
sly nods with which Hopley peppers his adaptation. It is, in many respects, the
closest I’ve ever been to the atmosphere of being in one of Shakespeare’s
theatres circa 1594 when Titus Andronicus
was first played; there’s a robust sense of fun, an audacity and an
outrageousness which makes the very concept just work simply because it is so
ridiculous and almost too well-thought-out. My only quibble is the visible lack
of stage blood, the bright crimson lifeblood which seems to bubble underneath
the surface of every Tarantino film, but it’s a quibble forgotten as soon as the
“title-shot”
is enacted, complete with music.
The stage here, albeit tiny, is perfectly – appropriately –
Shakespearean. There is no set to speak of, save a rock and a tree, with only
chairs, a barrel (of eisel, we guess), and a chest brought on
to supplement it. What we have are ‘Shakespeare’s’ words c/- Hopley, and they
are magnificent, resplendent, clever, and witty, and do not feel forced or shoehorned
into the scenes or situations at all; if anything, it makes the scenes come
alive with a verve missing in Tarantino’s original. Sure, the insane drive,
delight, and audacity of the low-budget film (now theatre) are still here, but Tarantino’s
words seem to grate and cut across the action; in Hopley’s adaptation, the
words enhance the action, transport it into a state of word-drunk lofty grandeur
and elevate the violent into a state of intoxicating transcendence. The opening
scene, whereby the dogs discuss the Madonna’s song ‘Like A Virgin’, is a
perfect example of this, and the rest of the play only gets better. It also
seems to feature every line Shakespeare wrote about dogs – ‘cry havoc and let
slip the dogs of war,’ (followed by a chorus of ‘Dogs! Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!’) being
perhaps the best, along with ‘that cat will mew and [the] dogs will
have [their] day’ – yet it never feels gratuitous or too clever; after all,
Tarantino is a master of subtle references, as was Shakespeare in his own day.
Once the cast lie on the ground, felled, a body count more
significant than at the end of Hamlet,
the lights dim and Key William returns to sing his version of Harry Nilsson’s ‘Coconut,’
joined by the rest of the cast before too long. It’s slightly cheesy, but so it
is in Tarantino’s film, and if nothing else, it guarantees you leave the
theatre with a grin on your face wide enough to keep you bouncing for days to
come. If it were created under another’s hands, you might condemn it as an “improbable
(pulp) fiction,” but under Hopley’s steady hand and eye, it is gloriously,
full-bloodedly Shakespearean. What more could you ask for to celebrate
four-hundred-and-fifty years’ worth of Bardly brilliance?
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