Riffs on Shakespeare: Juliet (and Romeo)
Young People’s Theatre
The National Post

Gender reversal has been going on in Shakespearean stagings for a good long time -- about 400 years, in fact - but title reversal is a new one on me. The avowed aim of Guillermo Verdecchia, director of Juliet (and Romeo), is to tell the old story from its heroine's point of view, or at least to put her at its centre. He succeeds, more or less, with the invaluable assistance of several people, including William Shakespeare.

It was Shakespeare, after all, who kept Romeo off-stage during the crucial fourth of Romeo and Juliet's five acts, leaving it to the leading actress to carry the most exciting part of the action while the leading actor sulks. Juliet defies her parents, drinks the potion and gets entombed alive while Romeo is cooling his heels in banishment. It's no wonder that, in most productions, she has been the star. One sometimes wonders how Romeo came to be such a romantic talisman outside the theatre, when inside it he is so often, though not quite always, the second banana. Third, if he's up against a good Mercutio.

Verdecchia's truncated eight-actor version does its best to de- emphasize the hero even further, for example, by transposing the text so that we get our first glimpse of her before encountering him. For the earlier parts of the play, Ieva Lucs' Juliet repays the compliment, falling spiritedly and touchingly in love. One of the show's best ideas is to have the couple speak much of their initial duet in unison, bonding before our eyes. The balcony scene is fun, too; the production is good at mapping out relationships, even if it's decreased their number. In the later, more testing sections, however, Lucs tends to summarize her emotions rather than act them. She arrives at the end of a process without taking us through the steps.

An actor playing Romeo has a tough enough time, even without having his name pushed into parentheses as if he were some kind of afterthought. Toby Malone is stocky and well-intentioned, and speaks with a broad Australian accent that seems designed to test the limits of multiculturalism. It serves him best in the scenes with his male friends, though the production, intent on letting us see him as something that happened to Juliet, has cut the best of these. Chances are it would cut his fight scenes, too, if they weren't so inconveniently vital to the plot.

In fact, the fights are here taken very seriously, as you may judge from the program, which lists a Fight Director, Simon Fon; then lists him again, as Designer and Builder of Weapons; and also throws in an Assistant Fight Director. The specially designed weapons are mainly knives, and the combats are tense and very nasty. Even with such limited manpower, the production manages to convey more of what is actually happening in the various brawls than do some that are filled with bodies. Everyone knows that in the opening scene the servants bite their thumbs at one another as a sign of contempt. This is the first time I have seen Tybalt repeat the gesture in order to goad Mercutio, and it makes a lucid prelude to their duel.

Mercutio is excellently played by Benjamin Clost, who jokes the Queen Mab speech without guying it; and his pal Benvolio is reasonably played by Karim Morgan as an earnest peacemaker who survives into the second half by appropriating lines that customarily belong to Romeo's servant.

A more noticeable casualty of the reduced casting is Juliet's mother. Peter Smith as Capulet has to speak for both mother and father. He handles his new single-parent duties most interestingly, presenting a man who loves his daughter and would like to understand her but who has no gift for it and so falls, through frustration and a short patriarchal fuse, into tyranny. When the Nurse tries to intercede for her charge, he strikes her. This should supply a straight line into the Nurse's own frightened betrayal, but Rae Ellen Bodie, having handled her moment of protest rather well, fails to make the connection.

Juliet's defiance of her dad seems to be, if not on the production's mind, then on the publicity's. It describes the play as "a cautionary tale" involving "disobedience of parental authority," thereby aligning itself with an old and, I thought, discredited critical tradition that condemned the lovers by referring back to Elizabethan handbooks on family values. If you can find me a Shakespearean heroine who disobeys her father and doesn't have the play on her side, I'll buy you a drink. The only obedient girl in the canon is Ophelia, and look what happened to her. In this play, the young show up the old, and nothing in this young people's production contradicts that. Its sense of period is rather puzzling. It has an Italianate setting, complete with steep perspective and checkered floor, fit to induce nostalgic sighs in anyone who remembers 1950s picture-book Shakespeare; the costumes, similarly, are off-the-peg Renaissance. However, the torches Juliet teaches to burn bright are plainly electric, and so is most of the music. If the aim is universality, it doesn't work, but it doesn't destroy anything either. Of course Shakespeare's own last line foreshadows the new title, but then there aren't many rhymes for Juliet.