“Load up on guns, bring your friends. It’s fun to lose and to pretend. She’s over-bored and self-assured. Oh no, I know a dirty word.”
Given Baz Luhrmann’s stratospherically successful contemporary re-envisioning of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet swapped the rapiers for glimmering handguns, it’s a wonder he didn’t adopt Nirvana’s then five-year-old anthem ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on the 1996 box office hit’s similarly chart-storming soundtrack. The title alone is apropos.
No matter, Luhrmann’s sassy adaptation brought the Bard’s tragic tale to a new audience, tapping into the all-over-the-place spirit at the broken heart of this 400-plus-year-old tale. That within the space of 24 hours, star-cross’d teens who spy one another across a crowded Capulet ballroom are ready to marry against their family’s wills and three days later die for one another is absurd, but also rings true. It’s why the timeless play, more tragicomic than the tldr suggests, is still readily adapted today, or even wholesale re-written a la & Juliet.
Which brings us neatly to Bell Shakespeare’s sixth rendition of the play, still managing to breathe fresh air into Romeo and Juliet’s dying breaths. Director Peter Evans deftly threads the comic and tragic elements as if stitching Verona’s fairest silk, enabling us to go along with these love fools. Starring Rose Riley (Richard 3) and Jacob Warner (Macbeth), the former keenly grasps the razor’s edge their infatuation slides across, from first act follies into the doomed finale’s breath-caught dance with destiny. If Warner’s not quite her switched-on match, then his Romeo is still grand company, all daggy hipster puckishness, skipping with the overbearing confidence of a young man brass-necking his way through insecurity. Rosaline who? Juliet 4EVA.
We stick with them even as they casually shrug off the collateral damage deaths of Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (a sparklingly snappy Leinad Walker) and Romeo’s bestie Mercutio (Blazey Best) with an immovable fix on one another. It’s the Bell ensemble that swoops this perky rendition up into the fairy light-strewn rafters, with particular credit due to a cocksure Best, upending Shakespeare’s gender fuckery with her nimble leap from strutting comedy to pained curse, “a plague on both your houses”, and on to a mic drop musical moment.
Lucy Bell is her gallant match in the gloriously clucking role of Juliet’s chatty Kathy Nurse, a joy from start to tear-stained finish. But it’s Noongar man Kyle Morrison, wearing Benvolio’s beautiful beating heart on his sleeve, who has the smartest, most subtle spin on Shakespeare when he addresses Romeo as “cuz”. That proud specificity unleashes a sparking arc of crackling electricity that emphasises just how much the cast sit in their own accents and identities while delivering the text with aplomb. This Romeo and Juliet is more Australian than Luhrmann’s.
Given this play’s all about impetuously lusty teens (seriously, it’s dripping with horny innuendo) and the great haste with which Romeo and Juliet vault over insurmountable familial hate, leaving a path of collateral damage strewn across Verona, staging the tragedy within the intimate confines of Arts Centre Melbourne’s quarter-round Fairfax Theatre is inspired. We get to sit in the consequences, even if Romeo and Juliet do not. Minimalism works here, with Anna Tregloan’s Melbourne-black costumes, spruced up for the ball with harlequin details, and her set design of two glossy, black-tiled dais and their matching free-standing walls giving off a subtle hint of the hedonistically heathen final days of Studio 54. Or perhaps, if we circle back to the ‘90s, the anarchic tragedy of New York’s Club Kids, who blazed a fatal trail from the Tunnel to the Limelight.
And far be it from this reviewer to make such an accomplished turn all about me, but Simone Sault’s choreography, ably abetted by Nigel Poulton’s genuinely thrilling swordplay, is abundantly generous enough to invite eager audience members to break that fourth wall and do-si-do onto the stage and into the throng of that fateful Capulet ball. So thank you to Alex King’s spunky gender-flipped Paris for asking me to dance. It was an honour to be your Claire Danes.
'Romeo and Juliet' is showing at Arts Centre Melbourne until July 29. For more information and to book tickets, head to the website.
