When Benjamin Kilby-Henson describes his version of Romeo and Juliet, it’s tempting to wonder how much of Shakespeare’s play is left.To begin with, Romeo and Juliet aren’t the only star-crossed lovers in the Auckland Theatre Company production he’s directing this month: Romeo’s friends Benvolio and Mercutio are also a couple. And there’s no Lady Montague or Lord Capulet.
As the children of single parents, Romeo and Juliet have deeper bonds with surrogate parental figures like their nurse (her) and the sagacious Friar Lawrence (him) – although Friar Lawrence is Whaea Lawrence (played by Miriama McDowell), an aunt-like figure who hangs out in a greenhouse and is more an Earth Mother than a Spiritual Father.
And rather than keep the action in Renaissance Verona, it’s set in a once-grand 1960s Italy where the characters wear Missoni and Pucci-inspired fashion. No word on whether Vespa motor scooters make an appearance, but it wouldn’t be a surprise.
What is a surprise is hearing Kilby-Henson saying he created this world without changing many of Shakespeare’s words and went into the production aiming to make it as authentic as possible.
“I haven’t had to manipulate any of the text, and that was really important to me. We’ve made some cuts here and there to references that just don’t hold up as strongly today as they might have done back then, but this is a really faithful treatment of Shakespeare’s text. Honouring that has been a big goal for this production.”
Indeed, Kilby-Henson believes there’s real danger in directors thrusting a concept on top of Shakespeare. He sees it as the director’s job to honour the story and find a sympathetic backdrop for it to unfold within. After all, Shakespeare was more or less doing the same thing, he says.
“He never went to Italy in his lifetime but was able to use an English perspective of what Italy would be like in order to make the story exciting. That’s why, aside from a few cuts, we’ve not mucked around with the text at all. Our beautiful, opulent 1960s setting elevates the story and gives us a romantic, nostalgic and evermore heartbreaking world. The 1960s is the decade of love, and it gives us a beautiful landscape to play with.”
To stage Romeo and Juliet uncut out of a wish for purity, as some companies around the world do, could now be seen as a gimmick in itself. Besides, adds Kilby-Henson, that might not be conducive to a night’s entertainment, given Shakespeare’s plays were written for Elizabethan audiences who didn’t exactly sit down, shut up and stay put for the whole show.
“They’d come and go throughout the performance – go to buy nuts or beer; nip out to chat outside; enjoy a prostitute for the middle of the show, and so on. That’s why so much of the original text has mini-recaps and keep iterating key plot moments. In our comfy theatres of today, we grab our wine beforehand and get into our plush seats – we don’t need all the information in the story given to us three times.”
Somewhere down the line, Shakespeare became high culture and there’s now an expectation that seeing one of his plays equals a “proper” night out at the theatre. Kilby-Henson acknowledges audiences want epic, operatic storytelling full of human themes that have lasted the test of time. When it comes to Romeo and Juliet, those themes have survived 400 years. Everyone knows the story; the characters are iconic.
“I think Romeo and Juliet has enduring appeal because it’s fundamentally about discovering one’s identity in relation to family. It’s a youthful story that resonates across generations, and I see this adaptation as a dramatic playground, a place to retell a familiar story that forces us to engage anew.”
Then there’s the language. “There’s also an expectation that the language will be a barrier – that’s half the work in rehearsals, making the language feel accessible. Sometimes we can think of the language as something old and fusty, but this is actually language in its infancy: if a word didn’t exist to describe what he wanted, Shakespeare simply made one up. This is language that is alive and robust and elastic.”
In a corner of ATC’s rehearsal room, Kilby-Henson, 40, set up a little library of Shakespeare books he’d read as a 16-year-old schoolboy in England when he was studying for exams. What he never saw referenced in any of those books were LGBTQI+ relationships or challenges to traditional ideas about masculinity in Shakespeare’s plays.
Reading Romeo and Juliet afresh with the benefit of some 25 years’ life experience and a new generation of scholarship, he saw hints and suggestions contained in the script that signal there’s more to the relationships within the play than meets the eye or ear. He’s far from the first person to see those intimations. Contemporary scholars have been “queering the text” for a fair few years now, highlighting gender fluidity, homoeroticism and questions about traditional masculinity in Shakespeare’s work.
So, Kilby-Henson decided if Romeo and Juliet truly is an ode to love of all kinds – romantic, sexual, platonic, familial and through faith – it’s essential, especially for LGBTQI+ youth, to see themselves and their relationships reflected on stage.
Hence Benvolio and Mercutio are a couple, a change that provides them with a clearer story arc. Kilby-Henson believes this better reflects the fluidity of male friendships in Shakespeare’s time, saying relationships were often laden with layers that modern interpretations might miss.
“As we have structured society, especially through the Victorian era, we have become more rigid in our definitions of relationships. Back then, the idea of romance between men was less defined, fostering connections that transcended modern labels.
“So often, queer storylines are relegated to tragedy or conflict centered around sexuality. In our adaptation, the characters face external conflicts tied to age-old feuds, and their identities aren’t the focal point of their struggles.”
Auckland Theatre Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet runs until August 9 at the ASB Waterfront Theatre.
Boundless bounty
It has inspired plentiful paintings, copious operas, multiple musicals and songs by Dire Straits, Lou Reed, Taylor Swift and many more. Interpretations of Romeo and Juliet have also inspired quite a bit of time and geographic travel – Auckland Theatre Company’s new Romeo and Juliet is set in 1960s Italy, a kind of Verona with Vespas. Here are some places other screen versions have been.
Romeo + Juliet
Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 hit made Shakespeare sexy for a generation or two with the casting of freshly minted pin-up Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. It was set in a Miami-meets-Malibu hybrid Verona Beach and swapped swords for handguns, and the Montagues and Capulets were feuding mob families.
West Side Story
Debuting on Broadway in 1957, the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical became a classic movie in 1961 and got a Steven Spielberg remake in 2021. In both, fair Verona became 1950s Manhattan, where young gangs the Jets (white Americans) and the Sharks (immigrant Puerto Ricans) fought a turf war while ex-Jet Tony romanced the Sharks leader’s sister Maria from the bottom of a fire escape.
Romeo and Juliet: A Love Song
The 2013 NZ rock and hip-hop musical movie was set among the caravans of a Waipū camping ground and featured warring bogan families. It started life as a concept album by former Screaming Meemees Peter van der Fluit and Michael O’Neill. It ended with a movie that went unloved by local audiences. O rude unthankfulness!
Warm Bodies
The inevitable 2013 zombie apocalypse take on the story had Julie (Teresa Palmer) falling for a zombie named R (Nicholas Hoult), despite their different, er, appetites. For an utter R&J horror, there’s always 1996’s Tromeo and Juliet, which was the debut feature script for Superman director James Gunn. A Z-grade effort by trash merchants Troma Entertainment, it had in its cast Lemmy from Motörhead and came with a twist – that Romeo and Juliet are siblings.
Romeo.Juliet
Its cast included Francesca Annis, Robert Powell, Ben Kingsley, Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith and John Hurt. Only Hurt was seen on screen. The rest voiced the play’s characters over footage of feral cats shot by director Armando Acosta. Hurt played a Venetian bag lady who smuggled Juliet, a Turkish Angora, and family to America where she met Romeo, a long-haired gray living rough on the New York docks. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1990, confounding many, and has largely disappeared after playing as an in-concert film behind orchestras performing Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet music. – Russell Baillie
