Addressing Shakespeare’s best-known work, director Anita Rochon has chosen to defamiliarize it. Less a love story gone terribly wrong than an investigation into a massacre of innocents.
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission for purchases made through links on this page.
.
Romeo and Juliet
Announcement 2
.
When: Until September 24
Where: Sen̓ákw/Vanier Park, Vancouver
Tickets and information: From $27 on bardonthebeach.org
In the Romeo and Juliet now playing on Bard on the Beach, Verona is a charnel house.
A castle façade of imposing gray stone dominates Pam Johnson’s powerful set with a tomb looming ominously from beneath a stage littered with skulls. The director Anita Rochon has the work open in that tomb where Juliet wakes up surrounded by the dead. At the Capulets’ ball, where the star-crossed lovers first meet, each dancer is associated with a skull, foreshadowing the carnage that follows.
In tackling Shakespeare’s most familiar work, Rochon has chosen to defamiliarize it. Less a love story gone terribly wrong than an investigation into a massacre of innocents, this cut version starts with the ending, cuts out characters, throw across genres, and stages the famous balcony scene without an actual balcony. The work gains freshness, but at the expense of some of his best poetry and the passionate intensity of the lives of young lovers cut tragically short.
Announcement 3
.
When Juliet (the solid and confident Ghazal Azarbad) wakes up in the grave, she wanders around the stage watching the action, as if trying to understand how all this happened. The device privileges her point of view of the young people whose stupid violence will ruin everything. She is only 14 years old in the play. Her (Daniel Fong) Romeo looks even younger.
Romeo’s parents have been removed from this version, as have many of the tips from his assistant, Friar Laurence (Anita Wittenberg). Without rudder, Torn between his rational friend Benvolio (Angus Yam) and his brash friend Mercutio (Sara Vickruck), Romeo he projects his strong feelings onto this girl from the enemy camp: in his eyes, a heavenly vision. but youLovers’ courtship feels superficial. The great romantic poetry of the balcony scene barely registers.
Announcement 4
.
The first half of the play is dominated almost entirely by the nurse, played with fierce comedic skills by Andrew McNee. He knows when to pull her character out of the comedy, as her grieving nurse does in the face of the play’s cascading disasters. But McNee’s comedic work is so strong, so funny and nuanced, that he threatens for a while to overwhelm the lovers’ plot.
In the only performance that can compete, the gorgeous Jennifer Lines plays Juliet’s mother, Lady Capulet. The role of Juliet’s father has been removed, so Lines delivers his horrible speech threatening to let Juliet “hang, beg, starve, die on the streets” if she doesn’t marry the man chosen by her parents, the hapless Paris (Ishan Sandhu). ). the The power of this scene is a reminder that the the previous generation violent authoritarianism is responsible for the destructive and pointless family feud that ultimately kills their children.
ad 5
.
Among the most effective elements of the production are the hauntingly toned hand bells that composer/music director Joelysa Pankanea has actors ring as they enter or exit a scene. Also impressive is sword fight between Romeo and Tybalt (Victor Dolhai), courtesy of fight director Jonathan Hawley Purvis.
One thing that needs to go is the lit torch that Benvolio carries in a long scene, unnecessarily smoking the small closed theater. If anything should burn brighter, it should be the lovers, consumed by their passion and bad luck in a Verona that values death more than life.
