A scene from Tamburlaine at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience.
Planning a date ought to involve hope, care, and a reasonable expectation that the invitee will enjoy what has been laid on. Simple enough principles, but judging by what I witnessed during the RSC veteran Michael Boyd’s powerful production of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (Parts I and II) at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience, the man sitting two down from me had not followed them.
He and his date (perhaps his wife, which would be no excuse) were, I would guess, leftish intellectuals of a certain age, herbivores by the look of them. This was not the play for her, and that shouldn’t have been too tough to work out in advance. Tamburlaine the Great, which was first performed in the late 1580s as two separate plays, is the wildly inaccurate retelling of the story of Tamerlane (Timur), the fourteenth-century khan who built an empire on the corpses of millions, a character very different from those commonly found in Park Slope.
Two stage directions:
He brains himself against the cage.
She runs against the cage and brains herself.
Demonstrative rummaging through a handbag began shortly after the first glimpses of Tamburlaine’s abattoir. It probably did not help that the killings were sometimes accompanied by a bucket of (stage) blood being poured over the dead, a neat touch that reinforced the brutal gaiety—four centuries
