ROMEO & JULIET (Lamphouse Theatre/Suitcase Shakespeare/Thespie)***

 

By Dave

Link: https://thespie.com/digital/suitcase-shakespeare-romeo-and-juliet-vimeo/2796

Available until:

If anyone tells you Romeo & Juliet is funny, that probably means they’ve seen this production. It’s one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies and whether you’ve read or seen the play or not, most people know that things don’t end well.

Things don’t end well in this production either but there’s still a lot of fun along the way.

The two actors set themselves the very difficult task of performing one of the most famous plays in the English language, just the two of them, in fifty minutes, using only the contents of their suitcases. Not the easiest thing in the world to do.

They followed the plot of the play, enacting many of the key scenes. They did this in a few different ways. They used some direct quotes from Shakespeare which were performed really well. Although these actors are brilliant at comedy, there’s no doubt they understand and know how to perform Shakespeare’s text, they didn’t just get it from York Notes or whatever kids use nowadays. They also translated parts of the text, hilariously, into modern English. This also worked very well, it got the meaning across and it made people laugh and what more do you want in life? They also used music, which I assume is original – they sing songs about something relating to the story and accompany themselves on the guitar. As singers, musicians and composers, they are very good.

They are also very good actors – although there is a bit of exaggeration in their acting in order to help bring out the comedy, they got this just right. Comedy can be a lot harder than a tragedy when it comes to acting. Most people think it’s sad when a couple of teens kill themselves but we definitely don’t all laugh at the same things so it must be really hard trying to judge the comedy so it reaches as many people as possible.

It really is a lot of fun watching the play and seeing what they’ve done with the scenes and characters you know so well. They characterised each person so well and gave them individuality and their own particular style of humour (Friar John is especially brilliant). The play went into 50 minutes really well and nothing obvious was missed out.

I’m not quite sure how the suitcases work. The idea is that all the props come from their suitcases. It sounds like a challenge but it’s not clear how much input they have into the contents of the suitcases. If someone else packs the suitcases and the actors don’t know what’s in them till they open it then that is different from a ‘let’s see what I’ve got in my magic bag’ effect where they know what’s in there but they want to surprise the audience. But the props definitely didn’t limit the storytelling.

My only reservation is that the play is advertised as helping people to understand Romeo & Juliet and I’m really not sure it does that. It’s great if you know the play and can see what they’ve done with it but I’m not sure it would help with any confusion about the plot or that anyone who didn’t know the play could work out what was going on from watching this production.

I did ask my kids to watch it to check this out but the results were fairly inconclusive and three kids from the same family obviously don’t represent all kids.

Older son did seem to know some of the ins and outs of the plot but admitted on questioning that he knew most of it already. Apparently it’s very difficult not to know things like that with me in the house.

Daughter had no idea what was going on but said there seemed to be a lot of murder and suicide and maybe this wasn’t the ideal viewing choice for an impressionable teen (I questioned her description of herself as an impressionable teen but got the dreaded eye-roll and the reminder that she’s twelve so obviously it doesn’t apply to her). Her level of understanding was probably slightly impaired by the distraction of her phone, which could not be removed from her hand as this is a violation of her human rights.

Younger son (daughter’s twin) did his very best to be helpful and did pick up a couple of plot points but didn’t really understand much beyond the gatecrashing, falling in love, marriage, suicide and “a few scenes where it looks like they kill each other’s friends?” He seems to view this as undesirable behaviour so I’ve obviously done one thing right.

So this production might not help much if Romeo is ‘running rings around you’ as it says on the Thespie site but if you enjoy alternative productions of Shakespeare plays, especially with a very small company of actors, you’ll probably enjoy this one a lot.