Steph Stainlay & Brett Witsenhuysen. Image by Al Caeiro
This production, based in and the familiar story of Romeo and Juliet, is full of geeky charm, personal moments and chaotic deconstruction. It uses self-awareness to poke fun at everything post-dramatic while simultaneously indulging in every over-used performance trope you could think of. It provoked laughter, thought and emotion, but overall left something wanting.
R&J is essentially a remix of the classic tale of the ill-fated lovers, but it keeps and plays with original themes such as violence, love, sex and death. Breadbeard have flipped the now well-worn structure of the play and have formatted this production by staging it in one room populated by ten people aged 18-25.
The main concern with this production was the strange blend, which has popped up in a number of shows lately, of deconstruction and emotionalism. It’s a very difficult thing to try to deconstruct all your characters, your story and the whole idea of performance and then suddenly get your audience to care when those characters start yelling at each other and dying.
It begins with deconstruction layered upon deconstruction, but as the show progresses it becomes more and more ‘straight’. This means the audience doesn’t get the chance to develop a real relationship with Romeo and Juliet because Shakespeare is only a minor part of the opening action.
One of the central ideas of the piece is that narrative is inevitable, that somehow the power of Romeo and Juliet as a cultural force is inescapable. That may be true, but it’s certainly not inevitable that the audience care. The characters I do have a relationship with are the performers themselves. They are all wonderfully energetic and likeable but sadly they all withdraw as the performance goes on.
There are so many ideas in this show that it doesn’t seem to know what to actually make of them. It’s framed as an experiment, and as a mix-tape, and as a play of course and sort of a lecture on the play and another, different lecture on postdramatic theatre.
The performers talk mostly about love but they don’t seem overly concerned that anyone hear them or believe them, nor do they seem to display anything other than a collegial appreciation about what others say. It just seemed so nice and collaborative I started to wonder why they were speaking at all and what the show as a whole was trying to do or say.
In his notes director Lucas Stibbard mentions weight, gravity, hurtling to earth, escape velocity, the immense power of well-known stories. But I wonder if Romeo and Juliet is less a dense weight dragging us into its orbit than aerosolised narrative, so pervasive in our cultural atmosphere that we don’t even know it’s entering our bloodstream. But you can’t fight smoke and with nothing to resist all the wonderful action the show, and it is very beautifully orchestrated work, didn’t have enough drive to convince me that something important had happened.
3.5 stars out of 5
The Breadbeard Collective
La Boite Theatre
RoundHouse Theatre
13 – 30 Nov 2013
