The play that changed my life: ‘I was the badass queen in Titus Andronicus – we did it like A Nightmare on Elm Street’
Shakespeare’s bloody revenge-fest is full of horror and grotesquerie but the camaraderie of performing it with a youth theatre had an upbeat effect Titus Andronicus has to be among William Shakespeare’s worst plays. In fact TS Eliot called it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written”. Yet it holds a very special place in my heart. It’s a bloody revenge-fest in which each act of violence is more…
Key points
- A writer recalls playing Queen Tamora in Titus Andronicus with the National Youth Theatre.
- The production took place in a school gym and treated the play's violence as horror.
- The experience led the writer to study drama and move to London.
A writer has described how performing in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus with the National Youth Theatre changed the course of their life. The play, a bloody revenge story, is not highly regarded by some critics; TS Eliot called it "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written".
The writer was cast as Queen Tamora, the captured Queen of the Goths who destroys the family of the Roman general Titus. In the play, Titus discovers her actions, murders her sons and serves them to her in a pie. The writer notes the play was a huge hit in Shakespeare's day, comparable to a 16th-century slasher film.
Escape from difficult years
The writer's family was going through difficult years and they had been asked to leave their small-town Catholic school in north Wales. Getting into the National Youth Theatre felt like a lifeline, offering escape from those circumstances and a first trip to London.
Rehearsals brought together a diverse company of young people from across the UK. The writer says the cast barely understood the text and could hardly say it aloud, but the director insisted they could do it, so they threw themselves in. The collaboration and camaraderie were exhilarating and unlike anything the writer had experienced.
one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written
— TS Eliot
Becoming the ruthless queen
Playing Tamora, a mature and transgressionary woman with badass lines, made the writer straighten their shoulders and stand strong. The production was staged in a school gym, and the cast went for the grotesquerie at full throttle, playing the shock and horror of the murders as if it were A Nightmare on Elm Street.
By the end of the run, the writer says something in them had shifted. They got their act together, applied to study drama and moved to London, concluding that a bit of the barbarous Tamora had rubbed off on them.
