ROMEO & JULIET (Shakespeare Happy Hours)****

 By Cal

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnZ7L3H2LaE

Available until: Indefinitely

I love this play. You can actually get personalised versions from Ustar Novels and my adoptive mum gave me Romeo & Romeo, a gay personalised version about my now-fiancé and me. Our names don’t scan brilliantly, but it’s special to me because I loved seeing our names together like that (the ending wasn’t ideal, but it was a choice of either that or Hamlet) and also, it got me into Shakespeare!

This production has a male Juliet, but it also has a female Romeo. Many of the main characters are gender-swapped and I thought this was a great thing to do. I was thinking that you’d have the choice of either ignoring the gender element or buying right into it and looking out for all the subtle differences. I especially like the fact this has been done with one of the best-known plays – it’s a play that most Shakespeare fans will know already and anyone who doesn’t know the story and would rather see a conventional production before they see this one will easily be able to find one. Though I don’t personally think that not having seen a conventional production would put anyone at a disadvantage.

However, the gender swap was a bit too successful. The thing is, all these actors are so talented. They can play any role. If Christine Penney plays Romeo, she’s not a female Romeo – she’s a male Romeo. I am so used to seeing these talented women playing men as actual men and there’s nothing remarkable about it anymore. It’s just great actors doing great acting. Gender usually only entered my mind when it came to the genders of the characters.

I am really glad Shakespeare Happy Hours did this experiment, though. Although there have been many opportunities to see women playing men brilliantly, opportunities to see men playing women are few and far between (Alex Hernandez’s BDSM Bianca was a particularly notable – and brilliant – exception). At the time, I was just thinking of Juliet as Juliet rather than ‘male Juliet’, but the fact I accepted her and many other characters instantly as women is testament to the outstanding acting.

Romeo and Juliet are played by Christine Penney and Harry Waller. The first thing that struck me is how much like teenagers these two are. Romeo appears in his robe, takes a carton from the fridge and swigs straight from it. (I was… discouraged from doing that when I was Romeo’s age and I might have caught one of my brothers doing the same thing. Naming no names, of course.) Harry pouts and strops around like one of my teenaged sisters. I have seen productions where Romeo and Juliet are played by actors who are either teenagers or look like them. Christine and Harry are a little bit older than that, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Romeo and Juliet who have embraced the teenaged aspect so thoroughly and made me laugh to myself when I realised how much they reminded me of two of my siblings. Though I certainly wasn’t laughing at the end.

I’m also slightly in love with Daniel Kemper’s Nurse. He’s an angelic Nurse with a very naughty mind. Camp and cheeky, but with a lot of affection and love for Juliet, which we see particularly in an incredible breakdown scene. I think I’ve always slightly underrated the Nurse as a character, but I have seen some great Nurses in lockdown and this one might be my favourite of all.

Friar Laurence is another character I’ve tended to forget about in the past, but I won’t forget Natasha Magigi’s performance. She was assertive, decisive and drove the plot along magnificently. Friar Laurence has a big influence on what happens to Romeo and Juliet and it was great to see a performance where he was such a strong character. This performance has made me think much more about him as an individual and what his motivations are.

I really liked Montgomery Sutton’s outdoor Chorus speeches. They were brilliantly-delivered, of course, but something else struck me. I’ve seen quite a few plays where the characters go outside, but this was the one that really made me think about how it would look if we’d actually watched these plays in order and seen the world slowly opening up. There are some great written accounts of life in lockdown which will be interesting to read later, especially for people who are too young to remember lockdown. But I also think we can learn a lot from watching something like a Zoom play which isn’t about lockdown but which shows the effects of it. These plays really can teach you so much, both about the past in which they’re set and the more recent past in which they were filmed.

From the rest of the cast, Joel Colodner’s avuncular Mercutio and Ella Mock’s hearty Lord Capulet are particularly good, and there are also some great little moments like Jerome Harmann-Hardeman, usually so wonderfully measured, totally losing it in the role of the Prince.

The only thing that surprised me was how long the performance was. Most of the plays are cut down to an hour and a half and although several do run over, I’m sure this is the longest I’ve seen at an hour and fifty-three minutes. Of course, Romeo & Juliet is a wonderful play. I can happily sit through the whole play without cuts – but it surprised me and although it would have meant losing some good moments, I think the play could have been cut down to a more typically Happy Hours length. I’m not complaining at all, but that did surprise me.