We all think we know Romeo and Juliet — two foolish kids from rival families who excel at being star-crossed lovers and then, like, totally die for each other. Exit stage right.
But this weekend, their story is going to get a lot more familiar. Familiar enough to happen in our backyards. Dubai’s Montagues and Capulets will war with one another in a modernised rendition of the classic Shakespearean story at Ductac Theatre. Romeo + Juliet will run between April 21 and 23, marking the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.
While Shakespeare’s language has been preserved, the context, setting and dress have all been updated to 2016.
“We made the choice to make the Capulets a white, Western family from Jumeirah, and the Montagues an Indian family from Karama,” said director Liz Hadaway.
As a promenade, or site-specific, play, the audience won’t have a chance to get comfortable. They’ll be ushered from location to location between every scene.
“It opens with a street brawl. Two of the members of each household who are involved in the first scene — for the Capulets, Samson and Gregory, and for the Montagues, Balthazar and Abraham — will then be the guides for their respective families, in character, throughout [the play],” said Hadaway.
Upon arrival, much like a wedding, audience members will be split into friends of the bride or groom — 75 on team Montague and 75 on team Capulet. One half will follow Romeo’s perspective throughout the play, and the other Juliet’s, but both crowds will merge for their combined scenes.
The production — named Romeo + Juliet not as an ode to the 1996 Leonardo DiCaprio film, but as a reference to UAE’s Short + Sweet theatrical festival, of which Hadaway is also the director — is part of the British Council’s global initiative, Shakespeare Lives, which will celebrate Shakespeare’s body of work on April 23, four centuries since his death.
“When most people go and see a ‘classic’ play like this, you expect to snore through the second half it. It’s slow and boring,” said Sally Greenland, who plays Juliet.
Greenland, 31, is an Australian actress based in New York City. She’s been Lady Macbeth a few times, but this will be her first time as Juliet. “But [in this], we literally run from scene to scene. The number of times I burst into something. There’s an energy to [Juliet] and to the whole thing — I think people will be surprised at how dynamic Shakespeare can be.”
To make sure they got their chemistry right, Greenland and Taraash Mehrotra, 22, a Dubai-based Indian actor who steps into Romeo’s shoes, went on a few rendezvous around Dubai.
“From the start we were very clear that we need to go out on dates and just get to know each other better, otherwise it wouldn’t seem real,” said Mehrotra. “And we have — we’ve connected on a lot of different things, on music, on TV, cinema, theatre.”
One of Greenland’s favourite dates was to the One and Only on the Palm, a quiet reprieve for a hectic New Yorker. She was quite relieved when she showed up on set to find Mehrotra.
“It’s been just a pleasure to be honest, and it’s lovely, because as an actress, sometimes you turn up and you go, ‘Oh, God, my leading man is not particularly nice,’” she said. “In addition to spending all day every day rehearsing, we really actually like spending time each other, which I think is good for the chemistry. It’s nice when you want to be on stage with somebody.”
Degrees of cultural separation
On a more serious note, Hadaway chose to cast an interracial Romeo and Juliet, saying she “can see ways in which Dubai is this melting pot, but also ways in which, if you say to somebody, you know, ‘Who lives in Deira? Who lives in Satwa? Who lives in Arabian Ranches?’ Then there are certain nationalities that are associated with certain areas, and there’s certain degrees of separation within that.”
She believed that “inter-marriage, between race, between nationality, between religion” did occur in the city, but not often.
“With Romeo + Juliet, we’re seeing that cultural divide, that racial divide, that religious divide, that the two families are opposing the love of the young couple who see nothing but each other,” said Hadaway.
The two leads were just as caught up in one another on Monday afternoon as they gave tabloid! a sneak peek of a few scenes. One scene involved Juliet running into her bedroom and flopping face-first onto her bed, and another saw Romeo rolling around the stage in bratty despair. Both Greenland and Mehrotra embodied an adolescent spirit, delivering their lines with the overly energetic and nearly manic gesticulation of teenagers.
For Greenland, it was quite easy to remember what it was like being 13 — smart, reasonably mature but excitable nonetheless. She had visions of Juliet being Victorian — prim, proper, buttoned-up, and a victim of her circumstance. Instead, she found her character to be brave and in command of her own destiny. As an actress who plays a lot of passive women, she revelled in this.
“She’s very real; all my friends are courageous and kind and have a plan. It’s lovely to remember that Shakespeare really knew how to write female characters,” she said.
Mehrotra found that Romeo had a lot of love to give, and that the motivations behind his impulsive, fickle or even dumb nature were often misunderstood.
“You see him whining and being cranky at the start of the play, then you see him being in love, then you see him being in anger, then you see him being depressed, and then you finally see him being totally broken. A lot of people really underestimate what Romeo’s character is — he goes through a lot emotionally, and I think that’s amazing for an actor,” he said.
The cast will have to rely on their stamina throughout the production, dashing between seven major locations: the main Kilachand and Centrepoint theatres, the loading bay backstage (where the infamous balcony scene takes place), the Gallery of Light, a backstage dressing room and two different areas on the roof.
Some scenes, said Hadaway, will be more interactive than others. During an 18-minute party scene, audiences will be served food and drink and asked if they’d like to dance — a semi-intermission, of sorts. (“There’s a hip hop versus Bollywood dance-off in there, as well, and a DJ on the roof,” she added.)
It can be daunting, no doubt, to re-tell a classic that has been read, watched, loved and loathed by generations — with a contemporary twist involving texting, Instagramming and Snapchatting, no less. But there’s something to be said about breathing new life into a story that never seems to tire of being resurrected.
“It’s always nerve-wracking, because you think, ‘Everyone else is going to know it better than me. Everyone else is going to have their idea,’” said Greenland. “But my job is not to tell people the story they already know. My job is to tell people the story within Romeo and Juliet that I found.”
*Tickets for April 21 and April 23 have sold out. Dh100 tickets for April 22, at 10.30pm, are available from ductac.com.
