Alright, alright it’s clearly a prop but come on guys, it’s a play, she’s not actually gonna die. Suspend your flipping disbelieve will you?

I am full of admiration for the choreography and the sheer brilliance of the presentation, the set, the lighting and sound superbly contributing to a most atmospheric evening, and I cannot praise those responsible for this too highly. But is this enough? I do not think so, and hope to establish why during the course of this review.Despite convincing characterisations and some excellent exchanges between Benvolio and Valentine, the women dominate the play. Rosaline is scorned, vindictive, assertive and single-minded but she is also a fighter with a lightness and a sense of humour. Bianca, on the other hand, is a visionary, otherworldly, magical, holding the balance of the peace in her hands. Helena is the carer, the surrogate mother who expresses some of the frustrations that a carer feels while Rhona, the outsider from Glasgow, is seen as a threat.

I find myself in somewhat of a quandary penning this review, since I was not -and still am not -quite sure of what I was watching. Was it a play, a Masque, a fantasia, a choreographic display or an intellectual ego trip? In the cold light of afterwards, I am inclined to think it was all of these, but the balance was heavily weighted in favour of the last two.

The main action moves from the characters we know onto the shoulders of fair Roslaline, often mentioned but who never speaks in the prequel. Nevertheless, May (Justin David Sullivan) is a typically clever modern gloss on Shakespeare — a playwright, as Anne points out, who is “basically synonymous with gender-bending.” And if three of the couples, liberated by Juliet’s liberation, achieve surprisingly normative happy endings, the girl herself ends the show uncommitted, still trying to “own her choices,” apparently by not making any. To combat the coming of the light, Juliet attempts once more to change the world through language: she claims the lark is truly a nightingale. Where in the balcony scene Romeo saw Juliet as transforming the night into day, here she is able to transform the day into the night. But just as their vows to throw off their names did not succeed in overcoming the social institutions that have plagued them, they cannot change time. As fits their characters, it is the more pragmatic Juliet who realizes that Romeo must leave; he is willing to die simply to remain by her side. After Juliet is a play written by Scottish playwright Sharman Macdonald. [1] It was commissioned for the 2000 [2] Connections programme, in which regional youth theatre groups compete to stage short plays by established playwrights.

As a young actress working in London in the 1970s and 1980s, she was plagued by stage fright and desperate to give up acting. She and her husband Will Knightley had one child, Caleb, and although MacDonald was keen for another baby, they could not afford to expand their family. She turned her attention to writing plays, and her husband made a bet - if she sold a play, they could afford another child. Consequently, MacDonald wrote her first play, When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout (1985). It was a success - and also led to the birth of her daughter, future actress Keira Knightley. Remember, the audience has been building up to this moment for the past few hours so it’s got to be dramatically satisfying. Otherwise, you could have a riot on your hands. I could have used a bit more brain, though; “& Juliet” sometimes seems suspicious of its own intelligence, like a nerd invited to the cool kids’ party, only to get drunk and vomit in the pool. She has some excellent long speeches, which remind the listener of the Shakespearean voice, which is inconsistently (though probably rightly) sounded in the play.

Kate Duffy does remarkably well playing Rosaline and captures the confused and often helpless emotions that are pulling her hither and thither. The two lovers are dead and the Prince has forced peace upon the two households, the Capulets and the Montagues, but as everyone knows too well an enforced truce is barely a truce at all. They don’t even bother to hide the jukebox. It’s right there, out in the open, before the show starts: a chrome Cyclops glowering at you from the stage of the Stephen Sondheim Theater, of all places. Juliet is decisive when she fakes her own death so she can be with Romeo. She listens to Friar Laurence's plan and decides to fulfil it. Lady Capulet tells Juliet about Capulet’s plan for her to marry Paris on Thursday, explaining that he wishes to make her happy. Juliet is appalled. She rejects the match, saying “I will not marry yet; and when I do, I swear / It shall be Romeo—whom you know I hate— / Rather than Paris” (3.5.121–123). Capulet enters the chamber. When he learns of Juliet’s determination to defy him, he becomes enraged and threatens to disown Juliet if she refuses to obey him. When Juliet entreats her mother to intercede, her mother denies her help.