Romeo and Juliet

This Romeo and Juliet was the opening production of Canada’s great Stratford Shakespeare Festival for 2013, and it would be an epic understatement to say that it was a disappointment. The rest of Stratford’s opening week for its 61st season ranged from first-rate to dazzling, and I was pleased to have brought a friend, a longtime New York City writer on theater and art who had never been to Stratford, to see why I attend their openings every year as the overall best theater I see. But Tim Carroll’s approach to the great tragic love story was so mannered, artificial, and off-putting that neither Shakespeare nor Stratford came off looking like anything a theater-lover would want to waste time watching.

Carroll’s rationale for avoiding lighting changes, scenery changes and other stagings facilitated by modern technology, and the actors’ just talking to the audience is something of a mantra at the Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where he is associate director, but those simplifications of our usual staging are not the main problem with this production. Speaking the lines naturally to the audience is not the same as end-stopping them and reciting the verse so that it makes little sense: e.g., to say that “Romeo killed.” New sentence: “Tybalt.”

And if little in the way of costume changes is to be practiced, why should Juliet’s supposedly admirable but extraneous suitor Paris be garbed and made to move so effeminately? Except for some fight sequences and passionate moments by Jonathan Goad’s Mercutio and Scott Wentworth’s Capulet, the acting seemed subdued or nonsensical, and even the usually enchanting Sara Topham was only occasionally lovely. She seems out of sorts as Juliet and is got up to look like Romeo’s Aunt. Daniel Briere is a weak and unconvincing Romeo, and the usually delightful Kate Hennig seems remote and uncomfortable as the Nurse.

The intrusion of a charming group of happy musicians is a contrasting element of Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy that is effectively included in operas, ballets, and various versions of this play. But I have not seen any version before this one where the two lovers barely have time to die together before they must jump up and join into the grinning, joyous dance that ends this production. We do know that in Elizabethan theater, even plays ending in tragedy and death were concluded with song and dance. But we also know that Shakespeare’s audiences enjoyed all sorts of entertainers and sellers of snacks, drinks, toys, and sexual favors performed elsewhere and on the spot, individually and in groups, among males, females, and variations in between. I doubt that this Romeo and Juliet would have been any less effectively tragic or beautiful if it had been enlivened by such extra benefits, and we do have scholarly justification for including them.