Romeo et Juliette

The Thêatre du Nouveau Monde staged a translation of Romeo and Juliette this summer. Turns out the Beav had never seen or read the play and didn’t even know the story. (“C’est une historie d’amour…, no?”) So at the last minute we grabbed tickets and watched the final matinee.

The production presents the story clearly and directly, which, given this was the Beav’s first encounter with it, I was glad of. I could have lived without it being set in Mussolini’s Italy, but still, the core was there.

Serge Denoncourt, who was coming off his well reviewed A Streetcar Named Desire, was directing, and I’ve decided I don’t like his approach. He’s clearly caught up in the idea of sexual provocation and is willing to tinker with the text of the plays in substantial ways. Neither are necessarily problems—who doesn’t like a bit of sexual provocation?—but to my eye, he also seems intent on stripping away complexity and ambiguity as if insisting, bizarrely, that the play is accessible because it doesn’t actually have much to offer.

This production felt to me like a collage of imperfectly digested movie moments, and it was hobbled by wild and uncontrolled shifts in tone. The extremely tacky staging of the couple having sex on their wedding night (yikes) and the bumbling final death scene, during which a large part of the audience actually laughed (double yikes) are both good example of these missteps. The balcony scene—which seemed determined to establish that it was not (and yet was) a “Balcony Scene”—stumbled nearly as a badly by suggesting that the young protagonists were silly rather than falling into feeling. (Marianne Fortier’s Juliette comes out of the scene fine.)

Despite, all my complaints, the play survived, the Beav liked it, and as I left, I felt happy to have watched this story again. I was also happy to see it in translation because hearing Shakespeare translated is as unexpected now as it was to me last year when I watched Richard III. French Shakespeare is and is not Shakespeare in very strange and exciting ways.