ROMEO & JULIET (Shake-Scene Shakespeare)****

 

By Alan

Link: https://www.patreon.com/shakesceneshakespeare

Available until: Unknown

I think this is the first play Shake-Scene ever did online. They did some work with cue scripts before this but this is their first play. I can’t say it’s their first full play because they didn’t do the whole of Romeo & Juliet but they did the story from beginning to end.

It is really interesting to see this play and think about how different Shake-Scene’s plays are now. They do full length plays now. They do cuts but nothing major. Romeo & Juliet was only about an hour. Lizzie Hughes (or Lizzie Conrad Hughes, she’s called both) who reads the stage directions and prompts people was onscreen for most of this play. Now we only see her if they lose an actor for technical reasons. They had 2 Juliets which I don’t think happened in any other Shake-Scene play. The play ended with a jig which is normal for Shake-Scene’s staged productions but I have never seen this at the end of their online plays before.

I don’t want to say the plays have got better but I think maybe they have developed and got more of an identity? It’s hard to get an identity as a theatre company straight away. You have to try things out and see what works and see what the producers, actors and audiences like.

I liked nearly everything. There was a lot of this play missing and that confused me a bit. I know Romeo & Juliet quite well because I have seen it lots but not very well. So sometimes I wasn’t sure if a scene was missed out or if I’d got confused and it was happening later. It was a good idea to start small but I’m glad they do full plays now. I liked seeing Lizzie Hughes because it was nice seeing her react when the actors did a really good bit but it might be confusing if you don’t know the play. I don’t know why there are 2 Juliets but I didn’t mind. They did that in Read for the Globe too, they split some of the big roles. I liked the jig and it’s sad they got rid of that but they can’t teach everyone to jig online and it’s hard making everyone in sync on Zoom so maybe that’s more a theatre thing.

I thought the actors were really good. Romeo was played by Claire Richardson. She wasn’t as tough as a lot of Romeos (I’m not being sexist, I’ve seen tough female Romeos before) but it worked because I think Romeo is more of a romantic guy than a fighter. He’s always talking about the girls he likes and I think he only fights when he thinks it’s his duty. So I think it works to play him like that.

Larissa Oates and Georgia Andrews are both really good Juliets. They are good at the romantic bits and they have a good chemistry with Romeo. Georgia’s death scene was really good.

I like the friendship between Romeo and the other lads. It was a good idea for Mercutio and Tybalt to do the thumb biting bit. It is a good scene but it is not done by important characters and it is in character for Mercutio and Tybalt not to get on. I like the way Siegffried Lowe-Walker (Tybalt) and Valentina Vinci (Mercutio) showed the tension between them. Nell Bradbury was really good as Benvolio too.

Lady Capulet was just called Capulet’s Wife in this. I don’t know why. Maybe she is called that in some versions of the play. She was played by an actor called Suzanne. There is a Suzanne Marie in other Shakes-scene productions so I think it’s probably her. I liked the way she worked with Alexandra Kataigida who plays Capulet. He was a really scary and powerful character. He did the epilogue too. I thought that was good.

Geoffrey Kirkness was really good as the Nurse. Someone tweeted to say they liked his voice and I like his voice too. I really liked Linda Emmanuel as Friar Laurence. She did something completely different with the role which I haven’t seen before. It was like he was a pagan friar or something. It was really interesting.

I do kind of wish they’d done the whole play because they missed some good bits and I think they’d have done a really good job with them but I still really enjoyed it.