The lighter side of Roméo et Juliette
TNM and Juste pour rire present their own spin on classic love story
Can Shakespeare’s classic love story Romeo and Juliet, with its anguished teens and inexorable tragedy, be played just for laughs? Or mostly for laughs?
Roméo et Juliette, director Serge Denoncourt’s follow-up to last year’s Les Trois Mousquetaires at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, doesn’t stint on the darkness. Though Normand Chaurette’s French translation remains faithful to the original, give or take the odd bit of judicious cutting, the costumes and décor (including some overly on-the-nose projected film of Il Duce) tell us we’re in Fascist-era Italy. It opens with the Chorus figure menacingly setting the scene while dressed as a jackbooted Blackshirt (Jean-Moïse Martin, doubling as the alpha-prince Escalus).
Despite these grim historical tropes, Denoncourt injects enough fun into Roméo et Juliette to make it clear why it’s been chosen as a summery co-production between TNM and Juste pour rire. Philippe Thibault-Denis makes for an amusingly hangdog Roméo, pedalling around the set on a bicycle and pining, with self-dramatizing voluptuousness, over his first (and shallowest) love, Rosaline. The famous balcony scene is turned into a delicious physical comedy routine as the back wall tilts so that Roméo can scuttle up and down it like a lovestruck Spider-Man at Juliette’s bidding. If both Thibault-Denis and Marianne Fortier become less effective once the play darkens and they’re called on to whinge interminably (few actors survive this sodden stretch of the play), they’re both delightfully funny and genuinely touching in this most famous of Shakespearean scenes.
There are plenty of laughs to be had from the gang scenes, too, with the first street fight transformed into a slapstick rumble in a fencing school. But the biggest laughs come from Debbie Lynch-White’s Nurse, all blackened teeth and cackling innuendo, delivering tidbits of gossip on an endlessly recurring loop.
Mercutio, with his wild mood swings and shocking fate, traditionally provides the fulcrum on which the play overbalances from hijinks to heavy despair, and Benoït McGinnis’s powerhouse performance more than lives up to the character. In a move straight out of Baz Luhrmann’s movie version, McGinnis’s Mercutio first appears in drag and would clearly, if he had his way, be starring in a love story called Roméo et Mercutio.
Denoncourt and Pierre-Guy Lapointe’s elegant costume designs, and Guillaume Lord’s vast, classically columned sets give it all a sun-kissed grandiosity straight out of Bertolucci’s classic film of the same era, Il Conformista.
But the fascist trappings, although giving the occasional disturbing frisson, add little to the play’s themes. If there are links between Mussolini’s state and the murderous authoritarianism and blood feuds of Shakespeare’s Verona, this doesn’t come across either in Capulet’s unconvincing rage (as signalled rather than evoked by Antoine Durand) at his daughter’s “stubbornness,” nor in the rather woolly decision to (sort of ) divide the “two houses” into Blackshirt Capulets and dandyish Montagues.
This occasional sense of muddling through applies not just to
the production’s high concept, but also to the second, darker half of the play. It’s as if once the laughs are done with, Denoncourt loses if not interest in the play, then at least control of its momentum, and its slide toward tragedy feels perfunctory.
As a Juste pour rire comedy, it often delights. As spectacle, it’s frequently ravishing. (Look out particularly for the masked ball scene that pays homage to the sartorial greatest hits of costume designer François Barbeau, who died in January.) But as tragic drama, particularly once Mercutio has delivered his final curse, it’s all a bit bloodless.