Bristol Old Vic
I have several times in this column talked about the problem of prior knowledge in genre fiction. Is the assumed audience of a new Superman movie someone who
a: already knows everything about Superman
b: has never read a Superman comic or seen a Superman movie before
or more interestingly,
c: knows all about Superman but for the purpose of the present movie is prepared to pretend he doesn’t.
The answer is “it depends”. You’ll find Lord of the Rings a lot less irritating if you don’t know that Peter Jackson’s Faramir is not Tolkien’s Faramir. But Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man gains an extra layer if you do know that the nice black guy who is acting as Peter Parker’s mentor in the cartoon shares a name and a hair-cut with the nasty white guy who becomes Peter Parker’s arch-nemesis in the comic.
I thought about this while recovering from the Old Vic’s high-volume hip-hop travesty on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I enjoyed Hamilton, incidentally, although not quite as much as I feel I was supposed to, but it would be a bit of a pity if all musicals for the next twenty years have to take the form of poetry slams.
Take the ending. Romeo, as per script, hears that Juliet is dead and procures poison to end his own life. There follows a musical interlude in which apothecaries and doctors dance around Romeo chanting “are you sure you want to die” while he does hip-hop soliloquies about why his life is no longer worth living. At least, I assume that is what he is doing: the musical numbers were amplified to the point that the words were completely inaudible. He arrives at the tomb; confronts Paris, but doesn’t kill him. Seeing the tomb, he announces “oh happy dagger, here is thy sheath” and then does an elaborate, ghoulish mime which, based on how the fight scenes have been staged, may represent him stabbing himself. At any rate, when Juliet wakes up, there is plenty of poison left, and she drinks it. Everyone else arrives, and Friar Lawrence (a lady-friar [*], which makes a nice shadowing of Juliet’s nurse) shows up. She starts to summarise the previous events, but is drowned out by music, whereupon the Chorus repeats the opening speech (“two houses both alike in dignity”) while attempting to make the audience complicit in the tragedy. We sat and watched and did nothing.
Are we supposed to understand what is being done? Are we supposed to hear Romeo saying “oh happy dagger” and immediately think “aha, that’s really Juliet’s line.” Or is the premise of making-Shakespeare-accessible-to-yoof that the ideal viewer doesn’t know; that he or she just thinks that is what is said at this point? In which case the intended reaction must be utter confusion: why would this kid buy illegal poison and then talk about stabbing himself?
My go-to example of a creative reinterpretation of a text is Coronado’s 1976 Hamlet, in which a pair of identical twins play Hamlet, Laertes and Hamlet’s father simultaneously, while Helen Mirren merges Ophelia and Gertrude into a single character. It provides a breath-taking and provocative commentary on Hamlet provided you already know the story and can remember which lines originally belonged to who. Conversely, it would have been entirely possible to watch Queen Lear (by a local Bristol theatre troupe) if you had no previous knowledge of the play and assumed that Shakespeare's story was always about a Queen splitting her kingdom between three princes. (The female clown called her Aunty throughout.)
I don’t think that anyone watching this Romeo and Juliet without prior knowledge of the script would have caught its nuances. Overwrought filmed projections keep asking us ‘WHO DID IT” and saying things like “VENGEANCE” and the audience was asked to cast on-line votes about who was responsible for Tybalt’s death. I truthfully don't think a first-time viewer could have worked out which side was which: all the Tybalt's and Mercutio's merge in "those young men who keep shouting at Romeo for some reason".
Kyle Ndukuba (Romeo) is clearly a stunningly talented young actor who will probably be a major star before too long: his energy never sags and he never stops moving. I slightly wished he would. Mia Khan's Juliet is also excellent when the production allows her to be: her speech while she is waiting for Romeo to come to her bed is one of the few moments where I felt I was experiencing actual character insight.
Very probably the school parties would have enjoyed the jumping and the projections, and maybe young ears are better at picking out the words when people yell poetry through throat mics than mine are. And "Shakespeare doesn't have to be stuffy and isn't a sacred cow" is not a bad message to put across. But I don't think the sound and fury would have assisted them in coping with the longueurs in Shakespeare’s text. When the Nurse endlessly fails to come to the point and when the Capulet household spend hours bawling about Juliet’s death when we know she’s only faking they were most likely waiting for the next dance routine.
Yes, in Shakespeare’s version, the deaths of the lovers brings about a kind of peace between the warring houses. I suppose the message could be “see how your silly quarrel produced a stupid tragedy” rather than “isn’t young love beautiful”. I imagine he actually intends a religious metaphor. But this production somehow wants us to see the feud as related to modern civil disorder and race-riots. At one point filmed images of Priti Patel and Nigel Farage are projected over Capulet and Montague. But the attempt to literally superimpose a political sub-text onto the play doesn't make any sense. If anything, it accentuates what a silly play Romeo and Juliet is. I think it’s better approached as a comedy with a sad ending then a full on tragedy. It's a world in which no-one says what they mean, where everyone communicates entirely in puns and where a single misdirected letter leads to the worst misunderstanding of all.
[*] There were no Lady Friars in fair Verona where we lay our scenes, although I suppose there must have been convents. Ans very cool black kids caught in the middle of modern race riots don’t generally go running to clergy people to ask them to solemnise their marriages. There is an arsehole on facebook, complaining about an RSC Hamlet which none of us have seen, protesting about the fact that well actually Shakespeare’s play takes place in a castle, not a boat, and why would the King of Elsinor be on the Titantic in the first place, while the rest of the world screams “it’s a frigging metaphor”. We are all well used to Troilus and Cressida in the First World War, and Henry V in the Falklands and Richard III in, er, the First World War and it can work brilliantly, but in god’s name build a world with some kind of dramatic or narrative coherence.
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