Alongside A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet is surely one of Shakespeare’s most well-known
plays. Yet out of this gross familiarity comes a complacency borne of contempt
and over-saturation of two lovers drawn from feuding families, whose “misadventured
piteous overthrows / do with their death bury their parents’ strife.” Enter, then, Kip Williams, with his production of Romeo
and Juliet for Sydney Theatre Company. Tired of the age-old story of
two warring households, Williams has (boldly) shrunk the scale of the play’s
cast and scope to a mere ten players, focusing the story on Capulet, his
expectations for his daughter Juliet, and her own conflicting choices and desires;
how much of a toxic mix this is, then as now.
It’s a bold move,
and one that may very well set a cat among the pigeons, just as Tybalt explodes
amongst Romeo and his friends in the town square. Struck by the “underlying similarities”
between houses Capulet and Montague, Williams’ production gives us our own
world back at us, a world where “vacuous narcissism” and “old money” is “steeped
in unquestioned tradition.” A world where “violence is born of boredom, habit,
alcoholism and ego.” In doing so, he loses none of the play’s lyricism and
intoxicating poetry; in fact, his staging only serves to heighten it, and by
the end – almost three hours later – I dare you not to be left speechless in
your seat, the full weight of this spectacular, crisp, sharp production like Tybalt’s
knife in your gut.
David Fleischer’s
set is something to behold: a large box-like atrium, its three white walls
scuffed and tarnished through years of neglect, sits on a revolve and spins,
the clockwise pattern of its turning giving us both the interior and exterior
of the house in a single movement. Inside, we get the boys from Verona
The cast are all tremendous. Eamon Farren’s Mercutio comes close to
stealing every scene he’s in with his bawdy and lewd speeches and movements,
great swathes of text oozing trippingly off his tongue. He has a loose kind of
walk which, when coupled with his mustard velvet suit and his street clothes,
gives him the cut of a dandy or of a kind of peacock, strutting his stuff throughout
the town. Every inch a cynic and a dreamer, his Queen Mab speech is entirely magical,
and his death – coupled with a very poignant downplaying of his own mortality
(as well as his famous lines) – is always a shame as it deprives us, the audience,
of a true gutter-poet’s intoxicatingly vivid drug-trips.
Julie Forstyth’s Nurse is every bit of Mercutio’s match, her
behaviour and suggestivity a rival to anything Mercutio can muster; their brief
scenes together are wondrous to behold. As the play unfolds, we grow to see how
close Juliet and her Nurse were – are – and there are some rather beautiful
moments between Forsyth and Eryn Jean Novill’s Juliet.
Josh McConville’s Tybalt is every bit as dangerous as the ‘prince of
cats’ should be. You just need to look at him, with his shaved head and lean,
mean, and slightly hunched walk to know that he means trouble. In many ways,
McConville's Tybalt is a close cousin to his performance as Brett Sprague in Griffin
As the titular lovers, Dylan Young and Eryn Jean Norvill are
suitably breathless and naïve, and though older than their characters’ ages,
their emotional honesty and validity is integral to the play’s success. Just
fourteen in Shakespeare’s play, Juliet’s innocence is set against her
hauntingly eloquent poetry, especially in the second half, when she talks about
cutting Romeo out into “little stars.” It’s a beautiful
speech, and Norvill’s performance aches with a power and a rawness which belies
her characters’ age, but is also testament to her skills as an actor. As Romeo,
Young is initially equally breathless and anxious, their first meeting a nice
little bit of physical comedy. As their relationship grows and the play
develops, Juliet’s reluctant acceptance of events as they spiral out of control
is violently juxtaposed with Romeo’s determination to fight his punishment head
on; if they didn’t belong to Dylan Thomas, we could almost imagine Romeo raging
“against the dying of the light.” The pre-banishment scene between Juliet and
Nurse (III.2), and then Romeo and Friar Laurence (III.3) is a heartbreaking example
of their approach to their circumstances, and Juliet’s acceptance of her father’s
desire to see her married to Paris
Williams’ direction across the play’s almost-three-hour running time
is crisp, clear, smooth and robust; along with his shifting of focus onto
Juliet’s choice (or lack thereof), his editing of the text creates room for several
moments of physicality which open the story out into a semblance of our own.
His choice to cut the “Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?” scene (I.1) is both
bold and necessary – by physicalising what Shakespeare does in a scene,
Williams is able to throw us into the middle of the story’s social and
political world in a single image, and the moment also allows him to show off
Fleischer’s revolving set in a gorgeous montage-esque sequence. Set to a
dance-music score and rather electronic sound design (Alan John and Nate
Edmondson), the bass beat from the party scene suddenly becomes Romeo and
Juliet’s fast-beating hearts in a startlingly fresh moment of sonic poetry. There
are moments in the score which seem to be imbued with something akin to Sigur Rós’s
lyricism, and it perfectly captures the giddiness, the head-over-heels nature
of Romeo and Juliet’s attraction to each other, at the same time as hinting at
something darker to come. The visual poetry with which Williams stages the
second half of the play is all the more powerful for its simplicity, for the
haunting emptiness of its mise en scène.
Williams’ ending, whilst entirely comprised of Shakespeare’s lines,
is not your usual ending. It’s both a bold choice as well as a potentially
controversial one, but I don’t think it’s a bad choice at all. In light of his
desire to refocus the play more on the Capulet family, “on Capulet’s recruitment
of Paris
Sorry, Will.
Theatre
playlist: 30. Fitzpleasure, Alt-J
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