Shakespeare's R&J

Postcard Review by Caroline Russell-King

Show – Shakespeare’s R&J

Playwright – Adapted by Joe Clarco based on the work of William Shakespeare.

Production Company/Theatre space – (semiprofessional) Sage Theatre Company, The Shakespeare Company with Calgary Young People’s Theatre / West Village Theatre.

Length – 2 Acts (2 hours, 15 mins, one intermission)

Genre/s – Tragedy

Premise – Four male students at a Catholic boarding school act out Romeo and Juliet at night for their own pleasure.

Why this play? Why now? – A small cast R & J is a cost saver; everyone wants to produce the big stage classics but can’t afford them so they opt out with modern small cast plays (like Vertigo does with Agatha Christie).

Curiosities – What would a production of this in San Fran in the 60s look like? What would a pants off version look like? When, if ever, will we go back to three companies doing their own plays instead of all the cost-cutting co-pros and tri-pros?

Notable Moment – Although counter to the text’s sword fights, the fabric battles were effective.

Notable writing – The real conflict in this adaptation is that four students are at odds with the environment in which they live. Unable to publicly act out Shakespeare’s brilliant play with a same-gender romance, four students do so at night. Because the four act as a unit of defiance, there is no conflict between the players. The “off stage monster” of oppression doesn’t deliver the conflict needed for the drama of this concept. The script is a truncated Romeo and Juliet script peppered with his other writings from the Bard (which has either been modified by the boys or some other theatrical convention and is not fully realized.) The lines borrowed from Midsummer Night’s Dream at the end “If we shadows have offended” are misplaced - it isn’t the shadows who offend us, it is the Catholic church -- and that is the tragedy.

Notable performances – As in its time, the parts of the women are played by men. As befits their age the young men playing the women ham them up with the exception of Brett Dahl who subsumes himself beautifully into the role of Juliet. His Romeo is played by Joel David Taylor and their chemistry is suitably intense. Comic relief comes in the form of Bernardo Pacheco Sosa’s Friar “Gilbert Gottfried” Laurence and Jamie Cesar’s bespectacled nurse.

Notable design/Production – Jake Rose’s set is minimal and symbolically perfect.

Notable direction – Because the script is an abstraction, Javier Vilalta is able to do what he does best - turn it into a choreographed symbolic movement piece. This style lives between drama and dance. We never get to really meet the boys in the script, so meaning is overlaid using intensity of boys full of hormones and testosterone. Vilalta has to overcome the fact there is drama in the play-within-the-play but not in the adaptation. The stylized choreography (along with the fight direction by Jeffrey Olynek) is tight, energized, and very well executed.

One reason to see this show – Two: Brett Dahl and Bernardo Pacheco Sosa.