Romeo and Juliet in the time of Covid
NEW INTERPRETATION FOCUSES ON MENTAL HEALTH CHALLENGES
‘It’s more about ills in society’
DID I enjoy the new production of Romeo & Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe in London last week? “Enjoy” is perhaps not the right word. At the end, Juliet takes a gun, puts it in her mouth and pulls the trigger. Her head slumps to one side. All right, you know she is acting.
But Romeo’s death is excruciating to watch after he has taken poison, believing Juliet to be dead. His body goes on writhing, bile spilling out of his mouth, until the agonising, interminable spectacle mercifully comes to an end. Is this enjoyable? Most emphatically not. It is too much like what could be the real thing.
The director Ola Ince had made her point – which is that there is absolutely nothing romantic about suicide. Hers is a play about the mental health of young people during the pandemic.
Shakespeare has Juliet a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, while Romeo is a few years older – anything between 16 and 20. Ince did not want to treat Romeo & Juliet, with the lead roles played by Alfred Enoch and Rebekah Murrell, as a tragic love story as has long been the convention. “It is a really sad story about teenage suicide,” Ince said during an interview with Kirsty Lang on Front Row, Radio 4’s arts programme.
“I found it strange when it’s not told that way. Because then it feels like we’re saying that suicide is romantic. And that these people love each other so much they take their lives. That, to me, is a sickness. That’s a really bad message to tell young people, anyone, that if you’re truly in love, you can consider killing yourself. That to me is unhealthy.”
The director’s Verona is a sick city in the middle of a plague, “its structures broken and its citizens in a state of desperation,” as the Globe puts it in its billing. “When a system favours the few, the many are left with nothing but unhealthy choices. Amidst the violence, bloodshed, fear and unrest, two teenagers find unexpected relief in each other. But will love be enough to save them from society’s sickness?”
After more than a year without live theatre, there was an eager audience at the Globe. The “groundlings” happily sat through the rain, but then were best placed to read the stark messages put up in brightly lit lettering above the stage. And it was not hard to guess where Ince was going with her messaging.
We begin with: “About 20 per cent of young teenagers experience depression before they reach adulthood.”
Then we go on to, “Patriarchy is a system in which men hold the power”; “When boys are taught the rules of patriarchy they are freed to deny their feelings”; “Love is a matter of life and death for young people who don’t have secure attachment to a guardian”; and “The number of London youth clubs has halved since 2011, young people have nowhere to go.”
There is a touch of the Sarah Everard case: “It is dangerous for women to go out alone.”
With young boys messing around on bikes, you get the feeling Ince has set her scene in a council estate in London.
We move on to mental health issues highlighted by the pandemic: “The rational part of a young person’s brain won’t fully develop until age 25”; “75 per cent of children with mental health problems are not receiving treatment”; “Emotional neglect is a killer”; “Suicide is the leading cause of death among all people under 35”; and “The loss of one of those close to us is the main contributory factor to suicide.”
At the end, the audience is told that organisations like the Samaritans and The Listening Place can help “if you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this production of Romeo & Juliet”.
In her admirably frank Front Row interview, Ince answered many of the questions I had in mind. Lang was right to refer to “her brave interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, which takes some of the romance out of the play and focuses instead on the mental health challenges faced by the two teenagers, who are growing up in a very violent city, which has also been hit by the plague”.
Ince summed up her take on the play: “Two young people who in the space of four days meet and then kill themselves. That’s not romantic. That’s some serious mental health issues.”
She had required quite a bit of persuading to take on the play when first approached by the Globe’s artistic director Michelle Terry: “So I dug deep for a long time. And rather than embracing the play, I came at it from a different angle, which was a bit more like: Why? Why do these young people kill themselves? How does that make sense? Is it about a kind of generational feud? Who’s to blame? Is anyone to blame?”
She started to grapple with the idea that “maybe these young people and their society Verona weren’t well, and that actually it was less a play about passion and love and more a play for me about societal ills and mental health”.
And now in 2021, “we all know what isolation feels like. We all know what it is to be anxious much more than before. It feels so important that we have these conversations because suicide, depression, anxiety feel like less taboo and more tangible and (there are) conversations that we have to have to help each other right now.”
She insisted: “There are lots of moments of joy still within the play ….. still lots of joy in the love these young people do feel for each other. Is it going too fast? Yes. Is it still joyous? Yes. Do we get to celebrate humour? Yes. Do we still celebrate life? Yes. And so I think the loss is even more, because we all get a chance to fall in love with these characters before we lose them.
“The play is definitely for now. It speaks about everything we’re going through right now. Especially not being able to touch. A lot of young people have given us feedback that they really relate to the themes in the play and the characters. Some people have said that the production is like almost a piece of new writing. But our hope is not too far away. I mean we haven’t changed the text. It’s still Shakespeare.”
Actually, I found the straight, classic Shakespeare is done very well.
The bard, borrowing ideas and themes from other people, had written the play between 1591 and 1595. “We think we’re doing what he’s intended,” said Ince. “He wrote plays for real people to deal with real issues. We’re just making sure that we are doing that too.
“It was definitely doing what Shakespeare has written. The only difference between our production and others is that we haven’t inherited other people’s ideas. We’ve looked at the script and gone: what are the facts? What are the questions? What’s on the page? It’s not as radical as people think. All we’re asking is that you come with a fresh mind.”
Romeo & Juliet is on at Shakespeare’s Globe until October 7, with a livestream through the theatre’s website on August 7