Shakespeare’s R&J adapted by Joe Calarco. Directed by Craig Ilott. Presented by Riverside Productions and Spiritworks at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, June 8-12, 2010.
Reviewed June 8, 2010 by Frank McKone
I left the Q feeling that something was missing or I was missing something.
Was it my fault for expecting more from a play which began a decade ago as a Spiritworks – Bell Shakespeare co-production? Perhaps it was created as a theatre-in-education piece rather than an adult production of Shakespeare. Young people behind me certainly enjoyed the young men’s sexual references at the beginning, and Nurse’s volubility, as I did, but I’m not sure they could believe in the love and self-sacrifice at the end.
Was it Shakespeare’s fault? Well, hardly, especially since we were given other bits even beyond Romeo and Juliet, like the Summer’s Day poem and part of Puck’s speech at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Was it the production? Well, no. Although much of the text was delivered at high speed, perhaps representing how young men might speak Shakespeare, the meaning was clear. The use of theatrical devices in the set design, sound and light design and choreography was very effective – less is more created imaginative imagery and meaning from simple props, costume changes, and lighting from darkness through hand torches to careful selective stage lights. Only the thunderstorm was overdone. Though the explosive sound represented the turmoil in the Romeo and Juliet story, darker rumbling may have been less melodramatic.
So I had to conclude the fault is in the writing – by Joe Calarco, who claims to have done no more than “adapt” Shakespeare. The problem is that this play is not about Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet. It is about four young men supposedly “who live together in the repressive regime of a Catholic boarding school (of decades ago)” who “engage in a clandestine reading of Romeo and Juliet” and who – according to the director’s notes – “are awakened, to themselves and to something greater than themselves .... it frees them to experience, to express, to feel, to fail – and to love.”
I could certainly see this intention in the set design and to some extent in the way the boys spoke their lines. I could see the idea in having the boys acting out what Shakespeare’s script demanded – the taunting of young males to the point of attack, with tragic consequences; the kissing and touching intimacy of the boy playing Romeo and the boy playing Juliet. But the four boys, called only Students 1, 2, 3 and 4, never spoke to each other in their own words, never named each other, and had no individual personalities except those they required as they played each of their various roles. Only at the very end, as the boy playing Juliet was left alone in his shirt-sleeves while the other three donned their school uniform jackets and departed, did I have a feeling for this boy, as himself, as he moved on from Puck’s dream speech to his own dream.
By this time it was too late. Here was the beginning of this play’s story, but in the last line. Instead of these boys exploring the text, as the director’s notes say, they are represented as having learnt the text with professional technique and level of understanding. Between attempts to perform the Shakespeare, we needed to identify with each individual boy as he discovers what Shakespeare meant and becomes aware of his changing feelings for the other boys. The play of the relationships between the boys needs to run in parallel with their play of the relationship between Romeo and Juliet, like a kind of double helix, to make a fully complex play called Shakespeare’s R&J. I saw one strand of DNA, but not its mate. This was what was missing.
