Skip to main content

On falling back in love with Shakespeare

Dear Richard,

I get it. You’re an actor. Keeping fit is a priority. But for the love of god man, maybe think about using the gym instead of running outside, in nature, where bad things can happen LIKE YOU HURTING YOUR ANKLE AND NOT BEING ABLE TO FINISH YOUR RUN AS ROMEO! Ahem, anyway, just wanted to put that out there.
From,
A Fan

The London theatre scene is a treat. Not only are performances plentiful, but more often than not, you have the option of seeing a film and/or television star on stage. Now, I like to think that for me, the play or musical is the main reason I book tickets for anything I see. If I’m being honest though (and what is the point of a blog if not for honest thoughts), Kenneth Branagh’s theatre company production of Romeo and Juliet caught my eye because of the stars in this poster.

I mean to say...whoa!


I mean, even if you weren’t a fan of Lily James and Richard Madden, you’d book tickets for this production immediately, right? And so I did. A week and a half after landing at Heathrow airport, I was headed to the Garrick Theatre for a bit of Shakespeare, and a LOT of Richard Madden. My seat was six rows from the front so I was confident I’d have a good view of the ex-Game of Thrones star.
Once the play began, it took approximately two minutes for a crushing disappointment to drown the whole night. The man on stage playing Romeo, was very blond and very much NOT RMadd.

What.The.Hell.


This couldn’t be happening. I’d never encountered an understudy before and this was hardly the night I wanted my first experience to take place. I used my eyes bore large, large holes into this usurper’s face in the hopes that maybe I could transform him into RMadd myself. Of course, this didn’t happen and a flush of anger gripped my being. I raised my eyes to the ceiling of the theatre and mentally bargained that if RMadd somehow, miraculously, came onto the stage in the next scene, I’d give the play a standing ovation, regardless of what happened from hereon in. Again, I knew that wouldn’t happen. And it didn’t.

For the first ten to fifteen minutes of the play, I was depressed. This boy was obviously channeling the best Romeo ever, Leonardo DiCaprio, and I just wasn’t convinced he was pulling it off. Also, Branagh had set his production in 1950s Italy and most actors had a bit of dark, brooding-ness about them and this Romeo looked like he came from the corn fields of Idaho.
O Leo, Leo, wherefore art thou Leo? 

And then.

After the fifteen-minute mark, something began to happen. Not only was I coming to accept this actor’s portrayal of young Romeo (by the way, his name is Freddie Fox), I was beginning to listen to the words of the play. The beautiful, melodic flow of words that could only come from Shakespeare’s pen (quill?). I was invested in this heartbreaking play of love and even chuckled as I remembered that he first half of the story is basically a comedy.

The audience was right there with me. How could I tell? I believe that the success of a theatre production is directly linked to the proportion of coughing noise from the audience. And this crowd, for the most part, was silent save for the odd tittering, and a little sighing when a bit of dramatic foreshadowing was being played out. A non-coughing crowd is quite extraordinary and I feel this compliment should be laid at the feet of Lily James, who vibrated with passion and who was utterly charming as fair Juliet.

Shakespeare’s legacy, his works and language, have managed to mould much of our culture and it’s easy to dismiss him in 2016 (despite the year of celebration it was as it marked the 400th year of the bard’s death). I’ve heard many people moan that Shakespeare isn’t all that great, that they don’t ‘get’ him and that he’s not all that relevant anymore.

But then you sit inside a theatre, expecting to spend over two hours lusting after the latest British heartthrob, and find yourself, instead, falling in love with Shakespeare. He is absolutely relevant in 2016. The themes of his plays are universal and timeless because as humans, we don’t change all that much. Love, loss, death, family. These are all still the markers of our lives. The balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet is an absolute thing of beauty. It makes you fall in love with love. It makes you ache for these young lovers and silently weep for their future. It makes you want to run home and open up one of the many Shakespeare collections you have on your bookshelf that you’ve actually not looked at since high school and/or uni and immerse yourself in Shakespeare’s works, his language, his everything.

And so, while I didn’t see RMadd as I had hoped, I believe my theatre experience was richer, more rewarding than I’d ever hoped it would be.

PS A few weeks after I saw this production, I was able to see a screening of the same Romeo and Juliet at the cinema, and this time RMadd was front and centre as Romeo. Dear god the man is attractive. But that’s all he was. Freddie’s performance was the better one. He was a more passionate, more dramatic Romeo and the chemistry between him and Lily James really did burst from the stage.
Still…

Oh RMadd



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On the existential crisis of the weekend

  Weekends used to be what life was for. Two days of freedom and relief from the weekday routine, from the grind of office life, from waking up with an alarm. The sweet, giddy euphoria of a Friday night was made all the more intoxicating if you had plans to socialise, go to a gig, watch a film, eat at your local Italian. Not only did you get your socialising/culture/food fix in, but you then had two more days of doing the very same thing. The weekend also offered endless pottering-around-the-house hours since usually it was a space you scarcely saw during the week. A Saturday started with a little light cleaning was one sure way to make you feel as if you were ahead in the productivity stakes, and made the Netflix binge that followed feel earned.   Friday night was balanced out by the cold sweats of Sunday evening but still, the weekend was always worth it, regardless of whether you didn’t move from the couch after Friday night work drinks, or because you p
Post a Comment
Read more

On my first trip abroad

  I took my first overseas trip when I was in year eleven. It was to Noum é a, New Caledonia and it almost didn’t happen. The trip’s purpose was to improve the French language skills of those of us insistent on studying French during our last two years of school, believing the subject a necessity for our futures when we would most certainly be in Paris living our best French lives being all Parisian and speaking fluent French and just being all chic in our Frenchness and you get the picture. The first step on this road to being so Frenchy so chic, was a week’s trip to this South Pacific island wherein we would live with the locals, have 3-hour French lessons each day and immerse ourselves in the otherworldness that comes with visiting a place far removed from that in which you live. But whether it was the 3-hour lessons or the 3-hour flight, not enough of my classmates put their hands up to make this trip a reality. Cue teenage woe-is-me angst, the shedding of many tears, threats
Post a Comment
Read more

On learning a new skill

So how many new skills have you mastered during this Covid-19? Are you fluent in Latin? French? Turkish? Is your personal brand lighting up Twitter/Instagram/Facebook as you sell the wellness candles you cooked up in the kitchen after you created an online festival but before finishing a new dress made from scraps around the house you can wear when you next meet a friend for ‘exercise’ with a keep cup full of ‘coffee’? Spoiler, it has wine inside. Thought so. But guess what. It seems that if you haven’t managed to generally improve yourself, and a substantial number of people online, during this dire time of unprecedented crappness, then apparently you’re doing it wrong. (Bonus points if said improvement was expressed in a language other than that with which you were born). Having missed this chance at enlightenment earlier in the Covid-19 mayhem, this week I decided to give it a go. To change up lockdown life for the better. I vowed that no longer would I spend my
Post a Comment
Read more