Romeo and Juliet (NHB Classic Plays) E-Book

William Shakespeare

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 122

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Shakespeare's heartbreaking tale of forbidden love, brought to life in a new production co-directed by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh. It was performed as part of the Plays at the Garrick Season in 2016, starring Derek Jacobi as Mercutio, Meera Syal as the Nurse, and Lily James and Richard Madden as the star-crossed lovers. This official tie-in edition features the version of Shakespeare's text performed in the production as well as exclusive additional material, including interviews with Richard Madden and Lily James.

Leseprobe

William Shakespeare

ROMEOAND JULIET

edited byKenneth Branagh

with set and costume designs byChristopher Oram

NICK HERN BOOKS

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

www.branaghtheatre.com

Contents

Introduction by Russell Jackson

Production Details

Interview with Lily James and Meera Syal

Interview with Richard Madden and Derek Jacobi

Romeo and Juliet

Copyright Information

Set model for balcony

Set model for tomb

‘Brawling love and loving hate:’the passionate world of Romeo and JulietRussell Jackson

In the film Shakespeare in Love (1999) the young playwright is struggling to find the plot – even the title – of his new play, and needs the advice of Christopher Marlowe and a good deal of personal amatory experience before he is able to complete Romeo and Juliet as we know it. This makes for a good romantic comedy plot, and Shakespeare in Love is certainly more engaging as a prospect than Shakespeare Reading, but in fact the story had been popular for many years before Shakespeare turned to it, and his principal source was a poem by Arthur Brooke, The Tragical History of Romeus [sic] and Juliet, published in 1562. The play was probably written in 1595 and first published (the First Quarto) in 1597. Since then the play has enjoyed an afterlife rivalled only by that of Hamlet, including ballets, operas and symphonic poems, enduringly influential films (Franco Zeffirelli’s in 1968 and Baz Lurhmann’s in 1996), and a musical that has itself become a classic, West Side Story, first seen on stage in 1957 and on film in 1960. The play’s vigorous comedy, lyrical poetry of love and powerful tragic effect have never ceased to attract actors, directors and audiences.

The subject is in itself endlessly fascinating: young lovers who are desperate to survive in a hostile and patriarchal society, where their families are in deadly opposition to one another. (We never learn the origin of the ‘ancient grudge’: it may be some conflict of interests in the past, a political dispute, an affair of honour, or perhaps a combination of all of these.) The Verona of Romeo and Juliet is a city of wealth, fashion, style and wit, exciting but also dangerous: ‘Now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.’ It is a city of both the Italian Renaissance and the modern age, where the civic authorities can do little to prevent brawls in which ‘civil blood makes civil hands unclean’.

The effects of different kinds of passion are constantly compared. Before he encounters Juliet, Romeo is obsessed with another Veronese beauty, Rosaline, and he immediately connects his emotional state with the fighting of the play’s opening scene: ‘Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.’ The conflicts of the heart are as violent as those of the quarrel, and like them seem to be ‘bred of an airy nothing’ – ‘O brawling love, O loving hate, / O anything of nothing first create…’ The play returns again and again to the fierce emotions at war with moderation, the human conflict of ‘grace and rude will’ that Friar Laurence identifies in the power of plants and herbs.

For all the vitality of its comic scenes, there is never any doubt that we are witnessing a tragedy. The play’s opening chorus promises the ‘misadventured piteous overthrows’ of ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers’. What remains to be revealed is the specific nature of their ‘death-marked’ loves. The reference to the stars is already a clue to this. The play is littered with images of the heavens, in both the Christian religious sense and in relation to astrology. On his way to the feast where he meets Juliet, Romeo says he has had a premonition of ‘some consequence yet hanging in the stars’. Urged to flee after the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, he cries out ‘O I am Fortune’s fool’, and when he is brought news of Juliet’s supposed death his response is ‘Then I defy you, stars!’

The pace is rapid. Within twenty-four hours Romeo meets and marries Juliet, becomes the unwitting cause of a valued friend’s death, impulsively avenges him by killing his assailant, and is banished from the city as a murderer. The hope expressed by his friend Friar Laurence that the secret marriage would help to resolve the dispute of their two families is dashed – at least for the moment. Juliet is faced with the prospect of another, bigamous, marriage forced on her by her father, and her beloved and trusted Nurse betrays her by urging her to accept the situation and forget Romeo. The banished Romeo reassures Juliet as they part after their wedding night that ‘all these woes shall serve / For sweet discourses in our time to come’. Even so, he admits that ‘dry sorrow drinks our blood’. Juliet urges him to be gone – ‘More light and light it grows’ – and he responds with ‘More light and light, more dark and dark our woes.’

The lyricism of Romeo and Juliet has a muscular, energetic quality, quite different from the stale versifying associated with Romeo’s wooing of Rosaline, and the rhyming of ‘love’ and ‘dove’ mocked by Mercutio. In this passionate world, the richness and urgency of the language complement the play’s headlong action, ranging from the down-to-earth prose of the Nurse to the inventive bawdy of Mercutio, and from the wit of the sonnet that is the first exchange between Romeo and Juliet to the erotic lyricism of Juliet’s soliloquy – ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds’ – as she anticipates her wedding night. There are moments of extraordinary emotional and verbal expansiveness, such as Juliet’s declaration ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep: the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.’ Mercutio, who seems to speak from experience, talks of desire in the most cynical terms, but his diatribe against the delusions of dreamers becomes a lyrical as well as satirical fantasy on the effects of ‘Queen Mab’.

The lovers meet and part by night. The violent contrasts that fill the play’s language and govern its action, are reflected in this opposition between darkness and light, conjured up in the lovers’ two ‘balcony’ scenes and in the recurrent references to sunlight and darkness. When Romeo first sees Juliet at the Capulet’s ‘old accustomed feast’ he exclaims, ‘O she doth teach the torches to burn bright.’ Even in the tomb he imagines that Juliet’s beauty ‘makes / This vault a feasting presence full of light’. As the play ends ‘the sun for sorrow will not show his head’, but the ‘glooming peace’ between the rival ‘houses’ will be represented in the statues of pure gold promised by Montague and Capulet. The final lines, though, look out towards the immortality granted by posterity, ‘For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’ The play asserts its own power, and that of audiences across five centuries who, like ourselves, have participated in granting the lovers their immortality by enjoying the ‘two hours’ traffic of the stage’.

Costume designs

This production of Romeo and Juliet was first performed as part of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s Plays at the Garrick season, at the Garrick Theatre, London, on 25 May 2016 (previews from 12 May), with the following cast:

BALTHASAR

Nikki Patel

SAMPSON

Racheal Ofori

BENVOLIO

Jack Colgrave Hirst

TYBALT

Ansu Kabia

PRINCE

Taylor James

LADY MONTAGUE

Zoë Rainey

LORD MONTAGUE

Chris Porter

ROMEO

Richard Madden

LORD CAPULET

Michael Rouse

PARIS

Tom Hanson

PETER

Kathryn Wilder

ANTHONY/FRIAR JOHN

Matthew Hawksley

POTPAN/SECOND GUARD

Pip Jordan

LADY CAPULET

Marisa Berenson

NURSE

Meera Syal

JULIET

Lily James

MERCUTIO

Derek Jacobi

FRIAR LAURENCE

Samuel Valentine

Director and Choreographer

Rob Ashford

Director

Kenneth Branagh

Set and Costume Designer

Christopher Oram

Lighting Designer

Howard Hudson

Sound Designer

Christopher Shutt

Composer

Patrick Doyle

Casting Director

Lucy Bevan

Casting Associate

Emily Brockmann

Wigs and Hair Design Associate

Richard Mawbey

Text Consultant

Russell Jackson

Resident Director

Nicola Samer

Vocal Coach

Barbara Houseman

Fight Director

Bret Yount

Associate Choreographer

Pip Jordan

Design Associates

Frankie BradshawLee Newby

Production Researcher

Max Gill

PRODUCERS

For the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company

Kenneth Branagh

Tamar Thomas

For Fiery Angel

Edward Snape

Marilyn Eardley

General Manager for Fiery Angel

Jon Bath

ARTISTIC ASSOCIATES

Rob Ashford

Christopher Oram

Production Manager

Jim Leaver

Costume Supervisor

Stephanie Arditti

Props Supervisor

Celia Strainge

Company Manager

Gemma Tonge

Stage Manager

Tanya Gosling

Deputy Stage Managers

Rhiannon HarperFran O’Donnell

Assistant Stage Managers

Stuart CampbellSarah CoatesEmily Hardy

Head of Wardrobe

Tim Gradwell

Wardrobe Deputy

Rachael McIntyre

Wardrobe Assistant

Ben Enathally

Head of Wigs and Hair

Gemma Flaherty

Head of Sound

Wayne Harris

Sound No 2

Michael Rogerson

Production Sound Engineer

Keith Hutchinson

Lighting Programmer

Rob Halliday

Production Electrician

Chris Mence

Dressers

Jenni CarvellSpencer Kitchen

Deputy Production Manager

Gary Pell

Automation Operator

Ben Reeves

Music Supervisor

Maggie Rodford

Music Associate

Ben Holder

Music Programmer

Patrick Neil Doyle

Production Coordinator

Nick Morrison

Production Assistant

Rachel Francis

Costume designs for Juliet and the Nurse

Lily James and Meera Syal,Juliet and the Nurse

Speaking to Nicola Samer and Max Gill

How do you feel about portraying two of Shakespeare’s most famous women?

MS I try not to think about that. I think with every Shakespeare you do you’re aware of the thousands of Juliets and Nurses that have gone before you, especially when they’ve been played by people like Dame Judi [Dench]. You have to forget about that because every single one is different and no one will ever do it like you. That’s the beauty of the writing. Every interpretation will be different, there will be so many shades. For me, it’s important to think less about the character and more about the story you’re telling.

LJ You can only be present in the situation and react and respond within the realms of your own experience, as far as possible, and what you have decided for the character. The rest unfolds!

Is there a line in the play that has a particular poignancy for you?

LJ My favourite line that I say is ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.’ The image of the ocean is so beautiful and primal but I also think that there’s a lot of fear in that image, the unknown depth of passion, the total loss of control and surrender to another person in one moment. There’s no going back now!

MS I quite like the Nurse’s line ‘Seek happy nights to happy days.’ It’s an unexpected piece of advice from an older woman who you think has forgotten what it is to be in love. Her advice before it has all kicked off is ‘make sure things are alright between the sheets. For a happy marriage, that’s where it starts!’

Many of Shakespeare’s plays feature a ‘battle of the sexes’ in some form. Do you think that’s true of Romeo and Juliet?

MS Yes, to some extent, because the women’s attitude to love in the play seems to be fairly different to the men’s. There’s more pragmatism in the women. Certainly, the nurse makes a really pragmatic decision, having supported the relationship all the way through, to then turn around and say, ‘You know what: cut your losses, this is not going any further because it’s too dangerous.’

LJ There’s the assumption in the play that a girl’s husband or lover will be chosen by the girl’s father or by another male ruling her. Women certainly have less freedom in their choices compared to the men.

MS And in this way, it’s about patriarchy. But it’s also about Juliet and how she’s strong enough to challenge and fight back, which for a thirteen-year-old girl is incredible.

Have there been any surprises for you as you have looked at the play in closer detail during rehearsal?

MS From the point of view of the Nurse, I didn’t know that she had so many layers. She can often be portrayed as quite a broad comic caricature but actually there is a well of feeling. The grief for her child is there in every word and really influences how much she adores Juliet. She thinks of Juliet as her daughter. In her head, she is Juliet’s mother much more than Lady Capulet is. That’s why she puts her job, her everything, at risk to facilitate Romeo and Juliet’s union. That’s why her turning around is so shocking. But even then, that decision I think is to save her daughter. She knows that trying to stay with Romeo would mean she’d lose Juliet.

LJ I’ve been endlessly surprised by the play. Juliet continues to shock and challenge me. The momentum of her story and her growth is so dramatic. She’s such a strong character. But also I’ve been surprised by the music and rhythm in the language, that if you actually get into the heartbeat of the words, that creates the feeling, the story. It’s been amazing speaking Shakespeare.

MS I was also surprised when I realised the timescale of the play. Meet, marry, fall in love, and die. In four days. It’s extraordinary; you go through such experiences, highs and lows, and depths of despair.

LJ And it’s firsts for so many of them. It’s my first time falling in love, it’s the first time giving a daughter away for her wedding night, it’s two lovers’ first time having sex. In many ways, I think it is a play of firsts.

MS It’s so rapid. Everything’s on the front foot. It’s like a thriller. That’s the heartbeat of the play. It’s like a juggernaut that’s gone out of control. Once you light that spark between the two of them, that’s it, you can’t stop it.

Is there optimism or hope to take away at the end of the play?

MS The only glimmer is that this ridiculous feud between these two families is at an end. But at what terrible price? People learn their lesson too late. It’s too late to save two innocent kids who just fell in love.

LJ With the way our production has been cast, with Friar Laurence also being young, you really feel that it’s