The Original Theatre Company presentsShakespeare’s R&J
by Joe Calarco
July 21st 2008 - August 2nd 2008
Show starts: 7.30pm
Following on from the huge critical successes of Twelfth Night, Taming of The Shrew and last year's A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the award winning Original Theatre Company present Shakespeare’s R&J by Joe Calarco.
Set in the 1950’s at an exclusive boarding school, four pupils run into the chapel late one night in a bid to escape from their repressive school routines. One of them brings a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and they start acting pieces out. Perceptions and understandings are turned upside down as the fun of play acting turns serious and the words and meanings begin to hit home and universal truths emerge.
Told entirely through Shakespeare’s language, it is both the story of Romeo and Juliet but more importantly the journey of four lads who during the course of one thrilling evening discover the power of theatre and the new worlds it can open up.
Highly energetic, physical and packed with the energy of youth this really is Shakespeare at his most accessible and daring.
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Creative Team
Director |
- Alastair Whatley |
Producer |
- Max Lewendel |
Music Director |
- Ron McAllister |
Sound Design |
- Matt Downing |
Lighting Design |
- Alan Valentine |
Costume Design |
- Fiona Davis |
Designer |
- Victoria Spearing |
Choreographer |
- Yael Loewenstein |
Stage Manager |
- Gemma Wilks |
Education Assistant |
- Jo Wright |
Rehearsal Assistant |
- Derek Florey |
Cast
- Tom Hackney |
|
- Craig Gilbert |
|
- Chris Hogben |
|
- Sam Donnelly |
Reviews
US writer Joe Calarco has added a stroke of intense imagination to reinvigorate Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet. Four boys make up his cast, playing 1950s boarding school students worn out by academic regimentation and seeking a form of escapism. An illicit copy of Romeo And Juliet becomes their secret, midnight source of rebellion but as they start acting out its scenes, the boundary between the themes in the play and their real adolescent emotions begins to blur.
Calarco's 1997 play still manages to be bright as it makes its London debut, standing up to recent Romeo & Juliet adaptations in the way Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film continues to feel original.
Like Luhrmann, Calarco manages to bring a fresh accessibility to the text: he is able to emphasise Shakespeare's handling of teenage sexual passions while also showing how his protagonists cope against a wall of social prejudice.
The play's homoerotic charge could have fallen flat but Tom Hackney's Juliet and Christopher Hogben's Romeo bristle with believability and both capture the characters' immature and impulsive qualities.
The actors have a tendency to overplay their parts in places and director Alastair Whatley has them jumping around excessively. But these flaws are countered by excellent comic timing (from Sam Donnelly in particular) and Calarco's grasp of just how flexible Shakespeare's work can be.
3 Stars - Zenz Alkayat
Metro Read Full Review
The Original Theatre Company certainly live up to their name with this production of Joe Calarco's Shakespeare's R&J. The idea of staging a pared down Romeo & Juliet through the framing device of four recalcitrant schoolboys might at first sound a little trite, but through Alistair Whately's sharp and innovate direction and the efforts of a strong cast who all maintain an extraordinarily high level of physical energy throughout, the result is a truly compelling piece of theatre.
With R&J, we are treated not only to a highly stylised and physical rendition of Shakespeare's tragedy, but also to the undercurrents of a secondary plot: the experiences of the four boys as they explore the play's themes of rebellion and repression, awakening new passions within them. Indeed, the play's setting; the school chapel, where the boys have secreted themselves overnight, together with the boys' metatheatrical coming in and out of character with schoolboy horseplay, prevents us from forgetting the importance of the play's framing device. Incense wafts through the set (an effective yet simple chapel interior) and aisles alike, infusing the very air with the dogmatic atmosphere of church, school, and authority.
The play's key scenes (the 'balcony scene'; the swordfight; the ball) are executed swiftly and almost effortlessly, with a high octane, physical energy. Church pews are quickly rearranged to form balconies, benches and bowers, and all but one actor (Christopher Hogben, playing Romeo) play a variety of the play's character roles: a particular highlight is Sam Donnelly's nurse which, whilst hilarious, refuses to become ridiculous and risk spoiling the play's constant tension and pace.
Hogben is clearly a very talented actor with a great command of verse, however he brings a certain hardness to Romeo that is not entirely appropriate to the play, and which rarely softens. As a result, we lose most of the character development, both of Romeo and of the schoolboy playing him, who is supposedly greatly transformed by his experiences. Tom Hackney's Juliet was honestly and sensitively portrayed, and as in all the best single sex Shakespeare productions, it was quite easy to forget that he was playing a female role. In his schoolboy persona he took on the role of 'class clown', which was a necessary ingredient to the ensemble, but was perhaps a little overplayed at times. The star performance was definitely from Craig Gilbert, who played a number of roles including Friar Lawrence and Mercutio, with a determined realism and quality of verse speaking that was immensely compelling.
Ultimately all four gave excellent performances, though it was in ensemble that the cast truly excels. I would recommend this play to all Shakespeare lovers keen to see an original take on a classic play, but also to relative Shakespeare novices; it's rare to see a production as accessible as R&J that also pierces right to the core of Shakespeare's work. R&J is Shakespeare distilled: and that can only be a good thing.
5 Stars - Darcy Brightman
remotegoat.co.uk
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The concept of single-sex Shakespeare has been thoroughly explored in recent years, from the “original practices” productions at the Globe under its former artistic director Mark Rylance to the work of Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller company. So there’s nothing terribly startling, in essence, about this adaptation by the American Joe Calarco which relocates the story of the star-crossed lovers to a Roman Catholic boys’ boarding school in the 1950s.
First seen in the UK in 2003 in Calarco’s own production, it caused a stir with its mining of burgeoning sexuality and homoeroticism in the repressed atmosphere of an educational establishment hidebound by class, tradition and religion. In Alastair Whatley’s revival for the touring company Original Theatre, however, the conceit feels strained – due in part to clumsy staging and some noisily self-indulgent acting.
In an overlong introductory section, the rigid routines of school life are implied. From offstage, we hear the Latin verb “to love” being robotically conjugated. Sonnets are given a dryas-dust classroom treatment; choruses of voices sing Jersualem. Eventually, four boys appear having, in an act of somewhat unlikely transgression, decided to meet in the chapel at night for an illicit impromptu performance of Romeo and Juliet.
At first they giggle over the wordplay – “‘Draw thy tool’ ” sniggers one – and the feuding Montagues and Capulets offer tempting opportunities for roughhousing. But undercurrents of allegiance and secret longing quickly emerge. The boy playing Mercutio has an enormous crush on Romeo and passion flowers for real between the romantic hero and his play-acting Juliet, to the disgust of the homophobic bully Tybalt.
All this may have been interesting had Whatley handled it with more finesse. But his production has high volume without intensity. Verse is often drowned out by the loud repositioning of wooden pews on the theatre’s unforgiving concrete floors, or mangled by a young cast which struggles with its rhythms and emphases. The boys never achieve emotional transcendence through Shakespeare’s poetry; there’s no lyricism here, no musicality or delicacy, just a lot of shouting.
Physically, too, the production lacks discipline; the actors fling one another about with adolescent vigour but there’s no very convincing sign of the tremulous tenderness that should underlie the masculine bravado. Chrisopher Hogben has the right intensity as a floppy-haired Romeo and all four actors work hard. But this slow, garbled interpretation does little to lend a familiar play any fresh accessibility.
2 Stars - Sam Marlowe
The Times
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Less of a play and more of a very cunning edit, Joe Calarco’s ‘R&J’ would have worked beautifully had it been allowed to acknowledge as much. Instead, this impassioned revival keeps tripping over its central premise, which looms like a dangling hem on a dancer’s dress. In it, four boys in a 1950s public school sneak down to the chapel for an impromptu midnight run of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Four pews and a Catholic brace of candles are all the props they need. The story they enact and the secret desires and animosities they bring to it cleverly overlap, pushing at the fourth wall they initially exaggerate and eventually forget. Tybalt, for instance, is head over heels in love with Romeo, who falls for his roseate Juliet at the ball, much to the disgust of angry, homophobic headboy Mercutio. But director Alastair Whatley has the boys forgetting that they don’t know the play, and then scrambling around for the single copy of the text to hand in furious search of a line.
You could forgive it, were the Bardic acting as tender and tremulous as such a scenario demands, but the performative volume rages so high, only Sam Donnelly’s Tybalt and the Nurse benefit from it. There are some nice comic touches, and rough-and-tumble passion aplenty, but precious few fresh insights arrive to render this bold revisioning necessary.
2 Stars - Lucy Powell
Time Out
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I don’t think I quite see the point of Shakespeare’s R&J - Joe Calarco’s re-editing of Romeo and Juliet, which overlaps the classic play with the story of four 1950s public school boys coming to grips with their burgeoning sexualities.
It’s a potentially interesting concept - the boys have broken into the school chapel of an evening and, amid swigging of brandy and other assorted high jinx, begin to act out scenes from Shakespeare’s play.
The setup creates occasional peaks of homoerotic frisson - and violence - between the boys, but rarely conveys much else about the quartet or their respective personalities, for the principle reason that Calarco sticks much too closely to the original text and adds very little to it.
This is a real problem, because the overarching device of having the audience constantly aware it is watching people act out a play prevents any involvement with the dramatic action within Shakespeare’s original.
The end result is that while Calarco’s rejigging of Romeo and Juliet might be an intellectually impressive exercise, dramatically it falls completely flat.
And I don’t think it has anything to do - in this production - with either the cast or the staging. The four boys are all ably played and the atmospheric setting under the vaults near London Bridge fits perfectly with the atmosphere of a Catholic chapel.
Still, throughout the show, I couldn’t help but think I’d rather have been watching Shakespeare’s unedited original.
Alistair Smith
The Stage
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