Romeo alpha

On Saturday to a matineé of 'Romeo and Juliet' at Kingston's Rose theatre, billed as a 'bold and dynamic re-imagining of [a] timeless classic'. So timeless in fact, that we will more or less rewrite it. Jumping ahead, with a result which bears a similar relation to the original as the Armitage version of Gawain did to that original (see reference 1). Perhaps best described as a taster.

The stage side of the theatre had been stripped back to the concrete for the occasion, which made me realise, possibly for the first time, how like the 'Globe' this theatre is. The same sort of high, circular space, perhaps a little bigger than the Globe, with different seating arrangements, including a pit (for sitting rather than standing) in the middle but excluding the canopied stage thrust into that pit. In place of such a stage we had a large piece of playground equipment, cunningly wrought out of rough timber to look very like the concrete of the theatre's shell. A piece of equipment about which the cast, young and old, could climb and scamper as the action proceeded. The young half of the cast had clearly been trained in music & movement and were quite happy swinging from the bars. Somewhat above the action we had a platform for the musicians and their mixture of instrumental and electronic music - which I found both visually and aurally intrusive.

The set was visually very striking, but my take is that it was far too big. The play should be performed in a confined rather than an open space.

A fairly thin audience with a lot of quite young children, some French. Well under half full.

The production was somewhere in the triangle formed by the play at one corner, a children's story at another and a musical at the third. Guessing, I should think we got well under half the words of the play. There was also a slimming down of the dramatis personae, with, for example, conflation of the Duke of Verona with the Count of Paris (which I felt upset the dynamics of the play) and the conflation of Mr. with Mrs. Capulet. Perhaps to be truly contemporary the result should have been transgender. But we did have a young lady doing Mercutio, and she got physical aspects of the role off quite well. A smoker. I would only fault the director's seeming obsession with getting dying tremors in outstretched legs; all very realistic I dare say, but that is not what theatre should be about.

Given that the action ranged far and wide, I found I was sitting too close (in row DD) and I needed to keep moving my head to keep track of what was going on. With the result in the first half that I nodded off a bit. Second half rather better, with less running about and seeming to keep a rather higher proportion of the words.

Doing the play in modern dress without swords rather made nonsense of the fights to my mind. A quarrel between young people with swords is a quite different business to one between people with guns. And the fights in this play were quite important. I don't think knives would be quite right either, although Latins, then and now, are fond of such things.

We also had a signer standing to the left. Easy enough to shut out, but would, in another context, have been interesting in her own right. It would have been interesting to have had a talk with her, but she counted as a member of the cast and vanished after the performance.

At which point we decided to give the nearby Stein's a try, a not very long opened Bavarian restaurant. Traditional in the sense that you could eat a great deal of meat and dairy in the place. Our meal was very good. Chicken in white sauce with boiled rice and green salad followed by an excellent rhubard tart, a sort of cross between a French tart and an English crumble. Respectable riesling, brandy and coffee to go along with it all. In a previous life we would have gone for steins of beer and one of the full on sausage dishes, but we decided on this occasion to leave that sort of thing to youth. Good service. Reference 2. We shall be back.

Romeo beta may follow in due course, when I have got back hold of the words, presently awol.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/sir-gawain.html. And a search for 'gawain' will return further pearls of blogdom.

Reference 2: http://www.stein-s.com/kingston/.