Romeo and Juliet - Sydney Theatre Company 2013

Hi all! (first post yay :3)

Last week my friends and I saw Sydney Theatre Company's Romeo and Juliet at the Opera House. RnJ was the first Shakespeare play I read and one I'd been hoping to see on stage for a while, so I was super excited - and this production met all my expectations! Which is always fab.

The staging of the play was fantastic- a revolving floor with a building constructed on top was used to full effect for both street and indoor scenes. I was also impressed by the use of music - something Sport for Jove's productions of Hamlet and Othello were rather lacking in.

The producer mentioned that he intended to focus on the generation gap, especially within the Capulet family, rather than the Capulet-Montague feud, and this came across effectively. The world created through costume/staging/music/character was gritty and urban and a little surreal at times. I especially liked the party scene with all the male characters in rabbit masks - there was a hysterical moment when the actor of Capulet got his foot tangled in the string of a helium balloon when escorting Tybalt out the door of the constructed building set (he recovered very smoothly though xD)!

The actress of Juliet was phenomenal - in the same way Othello centres more around Iago than Oth, RnJ is in a lot of ways more about Juliet than Romeo - something I was aware of but didn't comprehend fully until I saw it, rather than read it (I never watched the Baz Luhrmann movie past act 3.1). This Juliet was smart and dreamy and headstrong and a little socially awkward and basically completely adorable and everything I could ever have wanted. She would have made a fantastic Desdemona. (I might have fangirled a little w/e I'm not ashamed).

I was a bit disappointed that every single actor was a skinny white boy white, it would have been really nice to see some racial diversity in there. Especially since headcanon!Mercutio is African. And considering this was a modern adaptation - by an Australian theatre company - I find it very hard to believe that they couldn't have found a single POC actor.

(On the plus side the gorgeous Condola Rashad is playing Juliet to Orlando Bloom's Romeo this year, so that should at least partially offset the glaringly white Fellowes RnJ movie coming out soon as well.)

As it was, Mercutio was appropriately wild and a little campy (and he had great chemistry with Benvolio and Romeo which was fantastic in every way). I was really impressed by the actress of Lady Capulet though. She injected someone I had previous held zero interest in with depth and poignancy and subtle but vastly different relationships with every single character she was onstage with.

Apart from the glaring white-ness I only really have two complaints about this production.

1. The second half got rid of the rotating building and had different lighting/staging/music. And this was.... what's the stage/theatre equivalent of cinematography? In any case, it still looked super cool and it pressed all the right emotional-viewer buttons but it seemed a little slow compared to the first half.

This is a minor quibble though. Being a geek I bought the program and actually read the essays inside, and I completely get what the producer was trying to do considering the mood-shift and darker tone of the second half of the play. But it just seemed a little slow to me.

This is more to do with RnJ itself than production choices. My favourite play, Othello, is notoriously fast-paced, whereas RnJ has a lot more waffling speculation and long tragic speeches and exposition. And they more than made up for it with a fantastic eerie 'tomb' scene with all these white-sheeted double beds in neat and completely creepy rows.

2. Act 3 Scene 1 is my favourite scene in the play (where Mercutio and Tybalt fight and a lot of people die violently).

They completely botched it.

It was basically all LETS FIGHT and then Tybalt stabbed Mercutio and Romeo stabbed Tybalt and BANG. Over in less than a minute. They didn't even fight! Just WHAM. STABBED. DEAD.

Total letdown. I've seen a couple other versions of this scene on youtube and all of them drew it out for full dramatic and comedic effect. Ah well. What's done is done.

Anyway! The last thing I want to talk about is the end of the play, which I loved.

The cast had already been cut down so that there was no prince and no Montague parents (they were mentioned but no one had been cast for them) so naturally the final scene with the Prince and the parents finding the bodies had to be changed up a bit. And by golly did they make the exact right choice here.

As much as people make fun of Romeo and Juliet for falling in love so quickly and often blame them for the chain of events that leaves half the characters dead.... it's the Montague-Capulet feud that killed everyone. And it's R and J's love that ends the feud.

In the final scene of the play the Prince gives a long exposition on how this terrible, longwinded, pointless conflict has resulted in so much death and tragedy. And then the families make up.

Since there was no prince - and no Montagues - instead the Capulets run in and discover Juliet right before she kills herself. Still alive and brandishing the gun she then leaps off the bed - and then she delivers the final speech, reaming out her father for the feud. It's particularly effective given the way he threatened and pressured her into marrying Paris just a few scenes earlier.

I'm not explaining it well here at all. But it was absolutely fantastic - as an iconic female character Juliet is already amazing (and strong and sassy and by far the smarter of the two title chars) but giving her this speech was just totally empowering. Both for an often underrated character, as well as the female viewer. Juliet was in control of that scene and Juliet owned it.

I have to admit, at the end of the play when the stage blacked out without Juliet still brandishing the gun, I was a tiny bit peeved. I had expected it to end with her shooting herself as one final act of defiance, or at least hear the gunshot sound in the darkness so we don't know if she shot herself or her father.

Also, it seemed like a bit of a cop-out to end a tragedy without all the characters who are meant to be dead, actually being dead.

But now, a week later, I'm actually totally cool with that ending. That Juliet didn't need to shoot herself to prove a point - she'd already made her point. In fact I think it's stronger that she didn't end up doing it.

So! A fantastic and thoroughly satisfying production. While I do rank it below Othello and Hamlet on my enjoyment scale, that was more to do with a personal preference for the storyline and characters of the other two plays rather than any faults in the production of this one.

I have tickets to Waiting for Godot, also by Sydney Theatre Company, in a few months time! Looking forward to that :) (but not quite on Shakespeare level haha).

I rate it 4 puddings! (out of a possible 5 obvs. also i'll do a personally-drawn pudding rating cartoon when i can be bothered getting my tablet out haha)