Portrait

romeo & juliet is not william shakespeare’s best play ever written, let’s admit it, but it has become the world’s most talked about tragedy. this could be for many reasons. it could be because it is beautifully, albeit a little mushy-ly, written, it could be because of it’s universal message of harmony and peace, but it could also be because we like to believe it’s a tragedy about how love conquers all.

performing romeo and juliet is a challenge. you take something everyone knows, or thinks they know, and make it your own. there’s a multitude of pressure. some will roll their eyes and go ‘what a boring, predictable choice to have made’. some will applaud your decision to perform romeo and juliet and then expect all their stereotypes about the play and its charatcers to be enacted. romeo and juliet is neither boring nor great, i personally think shakespeare’s comedies exceed his tragedies by leaps and bounds, but there are a few things that romeo and juliet definitely is : it is heart-wrenching, it is an essential love-tragedy, it is glorious and melo-dramatic and sometimes even grossly sentimental (but audiences love this). it is also a play with twists.

as much as everyone thinks they know romeo and juliet, there’s a lot that the masses don’t know about the play, about the plot, about the characters. knowing the general story line is far from ‘knowing’ the play, and getting to know the play calls for a lot of reading, a lot of imagination on one’s own part and a lot of understanding human nature.

i watched the girls (all very young, all very new to theatre) who’d made the final cast of our 30 minute production of romeo and juliet for the all island interschool shakespeare drama competition, grow from nothing to everything. when we started they were scared of their words, scared of getting them wrong, scared of saying them wrong, scared of misunderstanding them. they were intimidated by the popularity of the play they’d picked, they were afraid of getting it wrong. after all, it is the greatest love story ever told.

we watched 3 different movie versions of romeo and juliet and read the entire play over and over again, searching in every nook and cranny for clues, characteristics and loop holes. we built every character into a whole person, with history, quirks, habits and actual feelings. we took what the play gave us and built the dynamics between charcters, imagining each relationship and its underlying chemistry. i urged them strongly to think outside the frame, to venture beyond all the age-old stereotypes that follow romeo and juliet around. we built and grew and created and imagined, and by the end, they were so sure of who they were, even if will shakespeare himself had walked up and said ‘why does lord capulet limp?’ we would’ve been able to justify it.

out of all the versions of romeo and juliet i’ve seen, i think baz luhrmann cast his the best. if anyone has any qualms, doubts or questions regarding the characters and how best to portray them, watching this movie (and perhaps ‘west side story‘) will give you the best idea. its modern setting will definitely help our generation relate with more ease to its plot and characters, making the job of understanding the people a lot easier.

romeo and juliet is a great play. perhaps its a bit of a crowd pleaser, but dont let its popular nature put you off its true literary value. to all those that scoff at this, go read the entire play first. and then come back and tell me that the words don’t blow you away, that the characters aren’t the creation of someone who really understood people and their ways, that the story doesn’t break your heart (a little?).

tell me you don’t agree that never was a story of more woe: than this of juliet and her romeo.