Romeo and Juliet – it is a classic story that everyone knows. It is a play that just about every teenager dreads and a title that elicits groans as high-schoolers prepare to study it. It is Shakespeare’s most studied work, particularly in high schools, and contains one of the most misunderstood lines of Shakespeare’s works – “Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore art though Romeo?” No, she is not asking where Romeo is. She is asking why he has to be Romeo, a Montague, rather than someone from a family that hers does not hate.
Whether you love or hate it, there is one thing that you cannot deny – Romeo and Juliet, as well as pretty much every other Shakespeare play involving men and women – is incredibly sexually charged. This is something that a group of four borders at an all-boys school discover when they act out the play after lights-out one night in Shakespeare’s R&J.
The boys go on a journey through Shakespeare’s writing, dissecting it, bringing out the humour in it, and the tragedy. The fact that all four of the characters acting out the scenes are boys brings up a number of issues such as homosexuality and the acceptance, or denial, of it. As the boys act out the play in the privacy of their rooms, the fury of the characters at the unacceptable joining becomes the fury of their peers. The fact that the entire play is acted out by four boys also adds an aspect of humour to the play that was not originally there as actors change characters at the drop of a hat using props and accents to distinguish which character they are playing when.
The fact that there are four characters, that they were all teenage boys and that it was a play within a play brought a whole new dimension to Romeo and Juliet, and it was one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Humour, drama, romance – it was all there, and it was all compounded into two and a half hours of wild, hilarious, heart wrenching fun.
If you want to see a new take on an old classic, I highly recommend watching Shakespeare’s R&J.
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