>>REVIEW
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Runs until June 9
Mob Hit Productions
Old School Festival
Vertigo Studio Theatre (Tower Centre)
Mob Hit is a theatre company that wears its esthetic on its Mafioso sleeves. With video opening credit sequences a frequent feature in its productions and a ubiquitous tagline keeping the whole affair on message ("This is a Mob Hit"), their small size belies a company with considerable ambition.
Postmodern kids to the core, their second Old School Festival is their brashest and most ambitious offering, remaking historical plays in the 21st century’s image, adding live DJ’d tracks to classic silent films, and bringing together a host of local bands for their Sound and Fury series. It’s a kind of irreverent exuberance that’s undeniably endearing, like a Last Supper diorama made out of wind-up Godzilla toys. But with all the joy the festival offers, its second year demonstrates that even the shiniest veneer sometimes needs a solid base coat below.
For a company whose name conjures gory images of gangland executions, Titus Andronicus couldn’t have been a more appropriate choice as the festival’s main production. Riddled with striking violence and unabashed bloodlust, the story of the play’s titular Roman general and his escalating familial tragedies provides ample fodder for Mob Hit and its talented actors, even if its uneven esthetic sometimes proves problematic.
It seems odd that artistic director Lawrence Leong’s production takes such pleasure in the fake gore of bloodied stumps and Titus’s severed hand, only to ratchet down the messiness in lieu of flashes of red light for major kills. It’s the kind of misplaced reserve that seems glaringly inconsistent – like the quickly abandoned brutality of an Iraq motif in the play’s first scene set against the giddy silliness of watching messengers delivering their grim tidings through musical Hallmark cards.
Clumsily trying to combine a few splashes of political theatre with slapstick silliness, what saves the production is the cinematic quality of Titus itself and an evenly talented cast who make the most of a play laden with excess. While Leong’s direction may seem emotionally discordant, the clarity of his cast members’ performances allows the sheer power of the script’s striking visual imagery to come through, succeeding where its artifice sometimes fails.
As Titus, Jason Schneider carries the weight of the tragedy’s building indignities with a strength that is both striking and vulnerable – a perfect combination for the once-proud general’s decline. Wounded by the pride of (X)’s wonderfully slimy Emperor Saturnis and the vengeful calculation of Barb Mitchell’s Goth Queen (her best performance this season), Titus descends into madness and feigned madness as his enemies watch. Along with his brother, Marcus (played with literate precision by X) and stoic son Lucius (Jesse Wheeler, whose turn as a trenchcoat-clad Winston Churchill analogue is one of the play’s most dryly funny visual references), the old general can only watch as his family disintegrates. It is a tragedy realized with pitiable physicality by (X)’s Lavinia, and observed by the trifecta of the play’s most gleeful villains: the Goth queen’s sons (X and X), and Aaron the Moor (played by the incongruously Asian Mike Tan).
As the centrepiece of a festival fusing old works with new esthetics, Titus mainly proves that the strength of any production built on a proven product is in its performers and not in the particular theme it wraps the work in. With a production loaded with such an excess of its own style, it’s still hard to fault Mob Hit for its vision of Titus Andronicus. However, while its central production finds its way through the esthetic, the Old School Festival still has a ways to go on its series of silent movies accompanied by live DJs.
With their original DJ (Metawon/John Bailey) removed by a wrist injury two days before the festival’s first Sweet Silence feature – a screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – Mob Hit was forced to make a last-minute substitution with Wal Martian. Unfortunately, Wal Martian’s well-intentioned set succeeded mainly in proving one of the inherent weaknesses of trying to layer a new look onto an old commodity.
In 1984, Giorgio Moroder caused a stir when he released a version of Metropolis set to a "contemporary" soundtrack. Of course, the problem with setting an enduring classic against the sounds of flash-in-the-pan ’80s synth pop was, unsurprisingly, that the new sounds became dated much more quickly than the original. As regular patrons of the Cantos Music Foundation’s Silent Movie Monday series can attest, there’s more to accompaniment than simply adding music to a film’s soundtrack.
Unfortunately, while a live DJ offers the chance for bumps and scratches, just as an organ allows its player to create chirps and other noises, Wal Martian provided samples that seemed more like ambience than integral parts of the screening itself, that sometimes were even glaringly inconsistent with the action on the screen. For the series to work, Sweet Silence needs to find the kind of bold performances that Titus boasts, infusing the old with new life instead of relying simply on the original subject accented with a few cursory touches.
Both Mob Hit’s Titus and Sweet Silence are concerned primarily with esthetic, an orgiastic blend of theatre and postmodern influences. It seems as though the company is still feeling its way through the initial glare of the glossy veneer. Yet, there is such palpable enthusiasm and endearing wherewithal that it’s impossible to hope that this Old School won’t open again next summer, lessons learned. |
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