ROMEO AND JULIET –The One With the Balcony Scene!

Romeo and Juliet is, alongside Hamlet, probably the most well-known of all Shakespeare’s plays, and for many the most rewarding and touching and eternal of the lot. Even people who supposedly know nothing about Shakespeare know this one, or bits of it, and it has been performed and adapted and re-invented in so many ways that one would think the world would somehow tire of it. But it never does. It seems to be everlasting, and eternally and profoundly popular. Perhaps not so surprising, really –it is, after all, the greatest love story of them all.

Personally though I never cared much for the play before; I found it soppy and soggy and over-elaborately decorated when I first read it (as a callow youth, too worldly for my own good!), and several equally soppy, soggy productions and versions I saw seemed to confirm this grand view of mine. It was not the Shakespeare I was attracted to when I first started to discover him, and I felt little sense of identity with anyone in the play –indeed, most of the characters I found immensely annoying. It failed to grasp me or excite me, and knowing very little about life or love or anything really at the time, I was blandly indifferent to its romance and tragedy.

And now –older and wiser– I return to it and find everything is different. It is a play that blows me away with its urgency, its poetry, its beautiful construction, its vividness and life force, and I think all in all it is one of the most sublime and riveting of all Shakespeare’s creations. I was actually quite startled by just how much I now enjoyed it and reveled in it compared with my first encounter with the text. It is a perfect companion to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which precedes it in the chronology I am following) and seems to spring from the same well of lightness and ease of writing as that play. Here, of course, the theme is ultimately more tragic, but there is a similar urgency and beauty of writing that seems to burst from the page as you read it. And the play needs to be read (or performed) with a similar kind of urgency, even though you frequently want to stop and examine a passage or a line more closely. I think that was how I read it before and why it didn’t work for me then: I was seeing all the technique of the writing but taking in nothing of the prosody of the text as a whole. It really has to be read aloud.

As for the story, I was struck by just how much scheming there is going on. Nothing is done straightforwardly. Everyone is ”arranging” or meddling in some way, even when they are trying to help, and this ultimately brings on the tragic conclusion to the tale. The wholesome, pure romance at the play’s heart is confronted with one barrier or obstruction after the other; the young couple of the title are pushed, manipulated and drawn from each other by the people around them, and yet their love for each other is so heartbreakingly earnest and determined and yet fragile. It is a play of youth, and understandably often resonates immensely with young people experiencing similar plights, agonies and frustrations to those expressed by the characters in the play. And Shakespeare seems very much on the side of the young characters here; he is fair to the adults, but the play does not really belong to them and nor do our sympathies. The nurse is, of course, comical and harmless and rather loveable, but Friar Laurence comes across as fascinatingly dubious, and there is a whole story in him that remains untold. As there also is in Mercutio –who has some of the play’s most memorable moments and stands out as one of the strongest ”friend” characters in all of Shakespeare.

I also felt much more accomodating to Romeo’s development as a character on reading the play anew. Previously, I had found him something of a shallow and fickle character in that he so quickly forgets his previous ”love” upon seeing Juliet for the first time. Now, I see that as an acknowledgment of him realizing that what may have seemed like love before was in fact merely infatuation, and that the meeting with Juliet is on a completely different level. Juliet, though initially ”greener” emerges as the more mature of the two, but there is such a touching sweetness to the urgency and yearning of their budding relationship that one really does feel that these two were meant for each other, and would have stayed with each other for always, had not they ended up such tragic victims of events. Yet because of their tragedy, harmony and peace is restored –a sharp lesson is learned by all; and rightly so.

There have been countless fine productions and film or television versions of the play, but those that have seemed always to work best (for me) are those which embrace the essential youthfulness of the story. The theme, being so universal, is immensely adaptable to many different settings, times and environments, but versions that cast against the youthfulness at the play's heart, are far more difficult to accept, no matter how talented the performers may be.


Favourite Line:

Romeo:
”Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.”
(Act 2, Sc.1)

Character I would most like to play: Friar Laurence

SHAKES-SCREEN: Titus (1999)

Marvellously Shocking!

Having just read the play Titus Andronicus I was eager to take a look at the 1999 film version. I found it an uplifting experience, because though the film was quite different to my own visualization of the story, it was a perfectly consistent modern take that both respected the language and construction of the original play and provided an exciting, personal interpretation –respectful of Shakespeare but true to itself. In fact, I rate it as among the best screen versions of Shakespeare’s work. Perhaps because it also succeeds in balancing on a line that is purely theatrical on one side and purely cinematic on the other –so that though I often feel I am watching a film of a stage production, I never feel constrained by this; for the film is genuinely and richly cinematic. I am also extremely glad that a certain amount of restraint was shown in the direction –it could so easily have been totally overloaded with effects, forced gimmicks and gore, but here the visuals –and impressive they are– never overpower the language and the interaction between the characters.

The performances are of a high level throughout, and the actors are all comfortable with the language, which is a relief because so many other “modern” versions of Shakespeare suffer from an inconsistent mixing of acting styles that distract us momentarily from the story. Here there is no attempt to slur the dialogue to make it seem “real” –it succeeds because it retains its metre and theatricality. I think Anthony Hopkins’ performance is interestingly low-key and playful –the character itself is a difficult one to fully sympathize with– but Hopkins takes us down many different paths. He is both former hard general, ambitious and later grieving father, warm grandfather figure, madman, avenger –a complex character indeed. And again, the restraint in his performance says more than any rant. I also particularly like the pairing of him with Colm Feore as his brother. Alan Cumming gives a very memorable performance as the emperor –I found this character difficult to fully get hold of when I read the play, but the boldness and audacity shown by Cumming makes him very clear –and again it’s never over-the-top as it so easily could be.

I think it does help to know at least something of the play before seeing the film as there is no real explanation of exactly who is who to begin with and this may cause some confusion –the unravelling of characters and their relationships is equally challenging in the opening of the play, so the fault (if it can be called that) lies with Shakespeare. The whole first act is a bit of a mess –perhaps intentionally– and though we are able to work out who is who and what their relationship is to the next person, it does demand a bit of extra concentration at the beginning of the film that could perhaps have benefitted from some form of narration or on-screen signing. This is, however, my only complaint –otherwise I found the film marvellous; utterly shocking, of course, but marvellously shocking!

Titus (1999)
Director: Julie Taymor
With: Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, Harry Lennix, Colm Feore

TITUS ANDRONICUS –The One With That Human Pie!

...Well! –it is hard to avoid being stunned into such terseness upon completion of reading this play, one I had not previously read or seen on stage and knew only from its notorious reputation for goriness. Several times as I read it I had to put down the text because I was numbed by the horror of what I was reading, for this is Shakespeare’s most sensationally savage play, and unlike that more renowned and stylishly heightened horror piece Macbeth, Titus Andronicus has a rawness and viciousness that is fascinatingly frightening to encounter. Written at a time when there was a trend for gore and sensationalism on stage, with a killing every few minutes, this play was one of Shakespeare’s most produced in his own time and probably is one of the reasons he became so popular a writer. Because it is shockingly ”good” theatre, providing just what the audiences wanted in a horrifyingly seductive way. It works in the same way that horror films do, or roller-coasters for that matter. I’d be fascinated to know how many people have fainted during performances of it, for I’m sure the number must exceed that for any other Shakespeare play. The number of characters who snuff it is also probably one of the highest for his plays; some barely last a moment on stage. But it is the manner of the deaths that is most shocking: This is set in a harsh period of history, centuries before Shakespeare’s own time (which itself wasn’t exactly humane), but serving sons up in pies to their mother is on a whole different level, even as an act of revenge. This is just one of several gruesome scenes that so easily could descend into farce of a very black kind if not seen in the context of the whole play or dealt with very carefully in a production.

It is a dark, troubling, upsetting piece –Shakespeare’s first tragedy, and bears signs of being the work of an enthusiastic but not yet fully developed writer, but it has terrific energy amidst its rawness and a clarity of thought and dialogue that, no matter how we feel about it, makes the lines jump off the page as we read them. And there are some real gems that make us step back a moment from all the gore –like the sobering words of Titus to his brother who has just killed a fly, asking him to consider the fly’s mother and father, for their sorrow at losing a child could be as great as a man’s. This is a terrific little scene that brings in a whole new element to our viewing of the story and of our own lives. Few of us have slaughtered enemies of Rome, but who has not swatted a fly and never given it a second thought? I have always liked such moments of reflection in Shakespeare –and I’ve come to realize that he has them in almost all his plays; moments where we are taken out of the story briefly and presented with an idea, a new angle on things, and this lingers in our mind. In Henry VI Part 3, for instance, there is the speech of Henry reflecting on being a shepherd rather than a king, and this is the same sort of thing. It is part of what makes Shakespeare so great.

I find the character of Titus himself to be quite difficult to fully understand, and though I was able to follow the unfolding story of his misfortune with ease and have sympathy with him in the middle acts, he does to a certain extent bring the tragedy on himself through his treatment of the prisoners he brings back in the opening scenes –killing the eldest son of Queen Tamora, already severely pissed off at being conquered. Her lust for revenge is right up there with Queen Margaret in the previous play (Henry VI Part 3) and with such a capacity for cold-hearted viciousness she makes Lady Macbeth look like a pussy cat. Were just these two characters (Titus and Tamora) pitted against each other, it would be in a sense a fair fight, but the real tragedy of Titus Andronicus is that of the secondary characters, and none more so than Titus’ daughter Lavinia –surely one of Shakespeare’s most unfortunate characters: jilted by the Emperor; her true love killed; ravished by two men; hands cut off: tongue cut out; then finally to be stabbed and killed by her father –her story arc is nothing but woe. Though she has few lines (even when she still has her tongue), she is the human centre of the play. Famously she was played by Vivien Leigh in the 1955 RSC-production with husband Laurence Olivier playing Titus. This is by far the most well-known production of the play. There have been others, of course, but like the other Roman plays of Shakespeare it is not produced very often –its gruesomeness is not necessarily good box-office, and companies wanting to go down a bloody path tend to go for the safer (and shorter) Macbeth. Also, as an early Shakespeare play it is always going to get less attention than the works that follow. But, I stress again: it is gripping ”theatre”, even when read, so do give it a go –if you have a strong constitution.

In my next entry I shall be reviewing the 1999 film adaptation (Titus).

Favourite Line:

Lucius
Bur soft! me thinks I do digress too much,
Citing my worthless praise. O, pardon me !
For when no friends are by, men praise themselves.
(Act V, Sc.III)

Character I would most like to play: Aaron