Juliet's nurse is an obscenely fat man with a red beard, her mother is a
shrieking harlot in a silk corset and fishnet tights, while her cousin, Tybalt,
resembles the devil dressed up as a flamenco dancer.
Yet despite the bawdy flamboyancy of this acrobatic Romeo and Juliet, there is little to prepare the audience for its comic coup, a life-size crucifix with an attention-seeking Jesus who plays the guitar and keeps a spliff in his loincloth.
This Icelandic production will firmly divide admirers and detractors — a noisily outrageous and sublimely camp evening that sacrifices some of
Shakespeare’s poetry but without doubt taps into the text’s hormone and
hatred-fuelled energy.
True, the balcony scene is reduced deliberately to a farce — when Juliet asks Romeo “How cam’st thou hither?”, he is being borne towards her slowly on a trapeze.
Yet equally, their flirtatious conversation about whether to join hands or kiss is given verbal punch because Romeo is hanging upside down from a chandelier and holding Juliet in the air — so that in order to embrace her he must use significant muscle power to raise her to his lips.
Although repeatedly declared a template for true lovers, Shakespeare’s tragedy, read closely, is patently about the momentary intoxication of sexual attraction — and Romeo’s declaration of weightlessness when he falls for
Juliet — “With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls” — proves a
central metaphor that works perfectly with the acrobatic approach.
Ã"lafur Egill Egilsson’s Tybalt shoots vertiginously down a curtain to deliver
his killer blow to Mercutio, while Romeo and Juliet’s wedding night is
suspended fantasy-style in mid-air — adding to the sense of a volatile world
that lurches mercurially between dream and nightmare.
If there is a gripe, it is that Nina Dögg Filippusdóttir’s Juliet has a
cheerleader-style brusqueness and a heavy-handed humour that irks when
the production reaches for greater depth.
Even so, this carnivalesque and risque production is a blast — a view evidently shared by the audience’s whooping teenagers, who experienced Shakespeare’s vitality in a way no classroom had ever taught them.
Romeo And Juliet
