Romeo and Juliet

Thanks, trusty Gordon, for coming along, and then swiftly offering your opinion. We certainly appreciate your recommendations! In fact, your timely observations helped me decide on a new way to solve the problem we had. More on this below. . As you list all the cast bar one, I'd like to add that Josh Walker plays both Tybalt and the Friar (in my opinion quite excellently)....and perhaps he'd be slightly miffed at your assertion that the cast appear to be the age of their characters! (But then, the marvelous Ian Toyne as Mercutio might be rather flattered by the same statement!) . A small point of my own...'metaphor' is not really the right word for the Apothecary scene you describe. A metaphor is when you describe something by way of something quite different, using one pertinent similarity as the connecting link. (To say "All the world's a stage" is a metaphor, because the world is not literally a stage, apart from the particular context of people seeming to 'play many parts' brought to life by the rest of the quotation.) To dress the apothecary as a street drug dealer is actually the OPPOSITE of a metaphor! It is a LITERAL translation of the text. Shakespeare's apothecary, as written, is an illegal dealer of potions that Romeo finds dressed in poverty in a back alley. All we need to do is give Shirley a hood and you get exactly the character that Shakespeare wrote. I'm glad you found it effective, but I don't think I can lay claim to creating anything so clever as a metaphor! (Although, on reflection, the 'matrix style' choreography is a theatrical metaphor for actual combat. So I do use one after all!) . And somewhere else where I do use a theatrical metaphor is that I admit right from the start (as does Shakespeare in a good many plays) that the events onstage are not real, but a story told by actors. That's the purpose of his prologue... and it's also how I get away with using 3 actors to represent a 'gang', or the cast of only 8 to represent a crowded ballroom with at least 9 featured characters present. Which brings us to the problem you described: I have slain Paris (yes, we're doing that scene!) and I run out of actors to play all the characters in the final scene. So I simply get the actor to stand up and play the new character. I really felt most people in the audience wouldn't have a problem with this. I thought the convention of actors simply taking on whatever role was necessary was well established in the very first scene, where I had Nathan Hitchens in the space of two minutes play Montague, Samson, Montague again and then Paris without leaving the stage or making any significant costume change. The audience are all suspending their disbelief anyway, so even if the final moment was distracting, it is extremely easy for them to realise what is intended and then get right back where we left off in the story. I didn't mind that some members of the audience found it odd and covered it by laughing. If they got it out of their system (which they quickly did) it meant they were better prepared for when I did exactly the same thing moments later and had Romeo and Juliet stand to become their own statues. I rather sacrificed the moment of the Paris actor standing up to prevent a similar reaction when the Romeo and Juliet actors moved. Turns out I was wrong. Even if 75% of the audience were prepared to accept the theatrical convention, I discovered they weren't really prepared to accept the distraction caused by the reaction of the other 25%..! And especially with younger audiences, it was likely that they would laugh, or some clown would whisper "He's a zombie", etc. Reading your comments above, and in discussion with the cast, I realised it wasn't fair on the good work they do, nor on the audience's investment in the scene, to allow the tension to be broken by such a distraction. . We tried rolling him under the back curtain in the semi-darkness...it was potentially just as distracting. We tried Romeo covering him with the curtain as part of the scene...it was just awkward, and besides, not every venue we are to perform in will have a curtain with this ability - not every venue will even have the ability to have a black out! (The show was designed to work fine without any lighting effects...but I must interrupt here to echo your compliments to Aaron Stirk on his lighting design. It really lifts the play). We even tried a metaphor! I had the idea of trying that when Paris dies, the actor removes the item of clothing that has been signifying 'Paris' all along, and leaves it in a heap 'dead' onstage. The actor then simply walks away (like a ghost, if you want to make that association), and can reappear as another character later. It was potentially too wanky, the kind of avante-garde I'd been generally trying to avoid..! In the end, we simply borrowed from Shakespeare himself, and reblocked the death scene so Paris can die and exit behind the curtain. Polonius in Hamlet dies the same way. It worked fine, and so the problem is solved. The danger of the crowd reacting to R&J standing up at the end is reduced a fair bit by bringing in a much stronger light (like 'a light from heaven') as Montague mentions the 'statues of pure gold'...this draws our attention to them before they move, rather than letting the movement draw focus, and by pre-empting it seems now to make sense that they can 'rise from the dead'. It would be great to hear of any other opinions or problems with the show. I'm willing to entertain any suggestions...if it's an improvement, you might well find we can incorporate it! Thanks, Gordon. Cheers, Craig ~<8>-/====\--------- PS 'the LATE William Shakespeare'..? That's a quaint way to describe him. Is there any other WS? And given that "late" is short for "lately deceased", your sense of the time passed is rather more general than most! "Indeed it is so very late, that we may call it early by and by"...