Romeo and Juliet

As a teenager I never enjoyed Shakespeare. For me, he was a dead guy I couldn’t comprehend. Confined to our desks, we’d struggle through each and every word. Simply, Shakespeare was a crossword puzzle without a clue. Indecipherable. The only happy moment I remember from studying him was the day Mrs Brown assigned roles for Romeo and Juliet. The first leading role was given to our mate; the second to the object of his affection. He had loved this girl from the start of Year 7. It was a love as boundless as the sea. He would have sacrificed everything to be with her: his friends, his family, his name, even his Radiohead CD’s. But unlike the titular characters these feelings weren’t shared. There was to be no leaping over garden walls; no recitation of Smiths lyrics to a bedroom window; no elopement to Gretna Green; no suicide pile up at her family's burial plot. This was a tale of more woe than Juliet and Romeo, for he hadn’t unclasped his heart to her; he hadn’t spoken those three words of clichéd heroism, “I love you.” Here in Year 10 was his chance to theatrically experience a relationship the real world cruelly denied. Aware that this was a transcendental moment for our friend, we supported him in the best way we could: by laughing at him until he was too embarrassed to go on. There is nothing more brutal than the banter of the adolescent.

BANTER!

At university my degree involved me taking a module, ‘Approaches to Shakespeare.’ Each week I read a new Shakespeare play and would then have to talk about it the following week. Finding the time to read in a week was difficult: what with drinking and Deal and No Deal viewing commitments, I would usually find myself in a position where I’d have to skim-read the text. Skim-reading a Shakespeare play is fine if you have read the aforesaid; but if you haven’t, then you’re essentially entering the battlefield with only pacifists for support. Consequently, all talk on Shakespeare would pass me by. He was for brighter people than me.

Then I took a year out before becoming a teacher. I thought, ‘If I’m going to be teaching Shakespeare, then I need to grow to love him.’ Over the course of the year I took from the library King Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet. Without the encumbrance of deadlines, I read them at my own pace; soon I revelled in the language, realised that every word didn’t have to be realised, that the feel was the thing.

Me in training for teaching Shakespeare.

Now I teach Shakespeare every year: from Year 7’s to 11’s. I fear that I don’t always do a great job. Now that Speaking and Listening isn’t formally assessed, there’s a risk that teachers won’t treat the play as a script but as a text. Previously, you might take more active approaches, given these performative skills could be graded. As it is, with the amount of material we have to get through, it’s hard to kick the desks to one side; to give children the opportunity to play at being players.  Shakespeare has become the ghost of Banquo: whereas before he stood by my side, he now hovers above: his severed head a reminder I’ve let him down; his anguished expression caused by my academic dissection.

It’s not just teachers that are wrestling with how to communicate Shakespeare, but The Globe theatre too. The Globe is Shakespeare’s home; although it’s 17^th century fire means the building that stands today is only a replica of what stood before, it is the site where his most famous works originally played. Last year The Globe took the bold move of hiring Emma Rice, the visionary Artistic Director of Cornwall’s Kneehigh Theatre, renowned for daring retellings of classic works. For all the excitement that greeted her appointment, there was consternation too. Rice’s works are a feast for the eyes, how would she fare with a playwright for the ears? Her version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was well received with high receipts and re-tweets. Critics were neither celebratory nor condemnatory, arguing that amidst the play’s riotous fun some depth was lost. The movers and shakers of The Globe weren’t happy at all, rumours emerged they were less than impressed by the sound and lighting Rice adopted. Just a few years earlier, Mark Rylance and Eddie Redymayne had starred in Twelth Night, an original practices production that used Elizabethan costume, make-up and candlelight to recreate the conditions of Shakespeare’s time. Rice’s view was quite antithetical: she didn’t want to look back, but forward. She would not invite the ghosts to the party, but put on her proton pack and blast them back to where they came from. She wanted to reboot Shakespeare for a digital age.

An Original Practices production.

This reinvention of Shakespeare has led to Rice falling on her sword. Next year will be her last as Artistic Director; for such a traditional space, perhaps it was inevitable her tenure would end in recrimination. Despite that, she refuses to go quietly, curating a Summer of Love season that promises to carry her idiosyncratic stamp of wild abandon.

Romeo and Juliet is directed by Daniel Kramer, a friend that Rice describes as ‘one of the most exciting directors working in the world today.’ Last year Kramer was appointed the Artistic Director of the English National Opera, an ascension that would be a compliment if it weren’t for the company’s dire position. With financial issues and board members resigning, Kramer had the unenviable task of reigniting the institutions fortunes. The juxtaposition of an inexperience figure leading a prestigious establishment is a contradiction shared with Rice. Joining forces with a kindred rebel is the surest sign that Rice will not go quietly into the night.

Kramer’s Romeo and Juliet is a crazy collision of sounds and scenes. Critics have described it as a ‘bellowing pantomime,’ some have gone further with the epithets ‘desecrated’ and ‘vandalism.’ When it comes to The Globe there is a school of reviewer that believes a production should be done in hallowed tribute to The Bard. Whereas Rice and Kramer don’t view the space as a Shakespeare’s mausoleum; instead they see it as his playground, a place where he invented, experimented and entertained. Kramer’s isn’t a candlelit vigil to the man, but a Day of the Dead celebration of his life and work. It is a mess, yet an exciting one.

Pic. courtesy of The Stage.

The performance begins with a recorded prologue sound-tracking Lady Montague and Lady Capulet giving birth to dead caskets. It’s a provocative opening that makes you aware this production will be singular and indelicate. Then, we’re into the fight scene where both sides trading of innuendo is brought to an abrupt halt by the Prince, voiced by an actor off-stage. Now herein lies the problem: the Prince in the play is a force for good, trying valiantly to keep the sides from killing one another; here, he sounds like a disembodied Dalek, ready to exterminate any character that doesn’t fulfil his request. This was the first moment when I thought the director had done something unnecessary to the play.

We’re then into Romeo being melancholic over Rosaline, the woman he loves that won’t love him back. Mercutio’s role goes against convention and is played by a woman. At first, I thought this was just to highlight the character’s effeminacy, but over time I realised that the director had traded genders and made the character a woman. This worked fine, adding another layer to Romeo and Mercutio’s friendship, suggesting there was an undercurrent of love to their relationship. From there, we’re into the party scene which like Luhrmann’s is presented in fancy dress: we’ve got witches, serial killers and a man in a giant dog costume. The sophistication of the masked ball is thrown from the balcony as the party becomes a den of iniquity with YMCA dancing and semi-clad gyrations. When my school went a few weeks prior, there were walk-outs and it’s easy to see why traditionalists would take umbrage at the overtly lewd approach. Kramer doesn’t do the suggestive dick jokes of Shakespeare, instead he rams them down your throat – whether you like it or not depends a lot on your attitude to sex.

Party scene. Pic. courtesy of The Globe.

More problems arise in the play during the balcony scene where it appears to be played for laughs. In film versions, the lovers lack self-awareness, they are too consumed by love to care about whether they’re doing the right thing. In this re-telling, they’re self-conscious, Juliet considers her stance: demure or coquettish? Women have gone from passive recipients to active participants in the game of love, so Kramer’s decision can be justified. However, with the relationship moving at breakneck speed it doesn’t seem in keeping that they would pause in self-reflection. By the end of the first half, I felt as though I had been thoroughly entertained, but at the expense of feeling anything for the characters.

The second half gives the story more room to breathe. With the focus turned away from the families onto the individuals, there’s space for the characters to grow. If I didn’t believe in how the characters fell in love, I know believed they were in love. Despite the pace slackening, inventive decisions are made with the structure to sustain the young audience’s interest. During Juliet’s fake death scene, the families reaction is put alongside the news reaching Romeo, and the Friar’s worry about what this might mean. In the script these are three separate scenes, the decision to unite them brings a jump-cut effect that modern TV viewers are familiar with. Kramer argues in his notes that shows like Six Feet Under prove that audiences can balance multiple narratives in their heads in a way that Elizabethan audiences may have found difficult. This Shakespeare is for a generation that thinks fast, but perhaps not carefully.

Although I’m in two minds about the play, I’m completely clear-headed in the belief that the music was utterly wonderful. As the play builds towards its climax, Washington and Richter’s This Bitter Earth soars with heart-rending, spell-binding majesty. Following the lovers tragedy, an actor sings Sinead O’Connor’s In This Heart, a gorgeous lament to ‘my love, my love.’ The argument that I was being emotionally manipulated by the soundscape holds water, yet there is no denying that by the end I was moved.

Ultimately, I came away from The Globe feeling I’d seen something unique, not always brilliant, but unique. The play has been in existence for over four hundred years, if people want to see a tights and earnest rendition then there is enough out there. In a play consumed by oxymorons (loving hate, heavy lightness, serious vanity) the production too is oxymoronic: it’s respectfully disrespectful, beautifully vulgar, emotionally emotionless, an ordered mess. It’s brilliant at times; terrible at others. A marmite production that the public has taken to and the critics taken against. 

Rice and Kramer have signed their suicide pact with The Globe but like the lovers their legacy might just live on.  

Romeo and Juliet runs at The Globe until the 9th April.