Star-crossed: Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Alongside A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet is surely one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays. Even if we’ve never seen or studied the play, we know its story from the plot of countless films, books, artworks, pieces of music created over the centuries. In his first production since assuming the reigns of Bell Shakespeare, Peter Evans goes back to the Bard and gives us a Romeo and Juliet that might be clothed in period costume but act and behave like contemporary teenagers. And like Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive reimagining set in the fictional Verona Beach, Evans’ production is for the most part strong and accomplished.

No holds Bard: STC’s Romeo and Juliet

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.

Mirrors, or The Play Chooses You

O, is all forgot?

All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream [III.2]

Preamble: People often talk about having a favourite Shakespeare play, the one play that they love and admire above all the others, for any number of reasons. While it’s a fantastic thing, I also think it’s not possible to have just one favourite Shakespeare play for ever, for the simple reason that as we go through life, so too do our tastes change; we keep looking in the mirror and seeing new things reflected back at us.

By my own admission, while I am a Shakespeare tragic, a bardolater if you will (I used to joke I had Bard flu), and have been for a number of years (since Year Twelve, if it matters), but it’s only quite a recent thing for me, if we talk about the passion and drive, the underlying connection to his oeuvre. Before that time, like a lot of people, Shakespeare was just this guy, you know, who wrote some plays about four-hundred years ago, and people think he’s pretty okay still… I never really ‘got’ why Shakespeare was Shakespeare, why he held such a godlike position in the literary canon. Okay, yes, Mum and Dad took me to see ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)’ when I was twelve, and I ‘got’ enough of it to thoroughly enjoy myself. (I particularly remember the ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet. One actor knelt in front of a chair with three tiny flowerpots strapped to his head, while another actor stood on the chair with a small watering can. ‘The balcony scene,’ the waterer said, deadpan, and the audience roared and applauded.) You could say that was the beginning, if you really wanted to.

But if you think about it, this idea of having a sequence of favourite Shakespeare plays, whether we like it or not, is actually a part of our education. Consequently, I have a theory happening, and I’m beginning to think it’s more purposeful and subtle, more conscious, than we’d ever assumed at first.