KVT at Romeo & Juliet: Audience, Audience wherefore were’t thou?

Wednesday was brilliantly Elizabethan: Brilliant directing, brilliant cast!

But where was the audience??

Posting this early in the hopes that you will see it in time to catch the last performance on Thurs night.

What a sad night it was at the Opera House on Wednesday….a brilliant opening night performance of Romeo and Juliet by TNT theatre, Britain. Sad because the house was only about a quarter full. I know that there are two performances to go on Thursday so I hope that the prospective audience was waiting till then. I hope it doesn’t confirm my worst fears that the expats in Hanoi on their meager salaries can only afford to go to shows when the freebies are handed out or when tickets are priced ridiculously low. I guess that when you consider that the best seats were 500 000VND each that this was beyond the means of so many of them and accounts for the fact that so many in the audience were Vietnamese. But then it may also mean that Shakespeare is just too difficult for them to comprehend.

What a great production it was….Shakespeare pared back to Elizabethan sensibilities. So much of theatre in those days was constrained by funding and casts were small and played multiple parts, particularly when plague times came around, as they did frequently, and the companies were forced to play in provincial venues, often outdoors and with a minimal set.

In modern and post modern times its been fashionable to present Shakespeare as an interpretation of the present condition but here we see an interpretation of the last decade of the 1500s when Queen Elizabeth was in serious decline and the back room intrigues of influential families jockeying for control of the crown and power an actuality; where the old Italian city states were places of romantic conjecture; where catholic priests couldn’t be seen as successful moderators; where youthful innocence once embodied by a passionate, virginal queen was an impossible ideal; where sovereign rule was sacrosanct and the ruler, spun by the spin doctors of the time, a benevolent figure; where death was a common visitor regardless of your rank; where the huddled masses found escape watching the invented lives of the rich and famous unfold and often disintegrate.

It was really exciting to see Juliet’s nurse being played to the limits of buffoonery and shallowness, that other protagonist Friar Laurence as a befuddled but well meaning manipulator, and to see the humor in the play, so necessary to the audience in the pit, being exploited. What a relief to see Juliet played so effectively as an immature, sexually budding 14 year old and Romeo a passionate, somewhat romantically idealistic, sexual 16 year old. When you are adolescent, at any time in history, and fall madly in love your mind speaks in sonnets even if your mouth doesn’t, and you know that the balcony scene is reality and pure romance.

Sensibly the production didn’t become purist and replace  the female characters with males, except in the case of Lady Capulet, but the role reversal of the Prince of Verona was a good twist and her final admonition that punishments were not finished with makes us fear for the likely hung, drawn and quartered fate of the friar and a public parade and flogging for the poor old nurse (unless we were the huddled masses of the day and  then we would have likely headed for the whipping  place or the execution ground for another piece of good theater)

Poetry, Death and Cupid rule the stage as the very excellent director intended and we leave the theatre not so much moved by the suicides of Romeo and Juliet but by the arrogance of a society that had allowed Cupid to become cupidity, and for an innocence lost.

Brilliant directing, brilliant cast

Mind you we were almost allowed to leave the theatre very moved until some character, that Shakespeare would have loved to use as a benighted fool, leapt out in front of the actors receiving their well earned plaudits and started yelling inanities into his microphone and almost turned the whole marvelous evening into a tawdry TV game show finale. I hope that the cast manages to hog tie, gag him and imprison him in the basement before Thursday’s matinee and evening performance.