After Juliet

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Romeo requests that Juliet declares her love for him and Juliet simply replies that she has already done so. This shows how loving and passionate she is, as she has given her love and heart to Romeo. These anachronisms are funny, but they’re also disorienting; Trépanier wants the audience to “feel like they’re in a world which they once understood, but has since been subverted – which is essentially what the characters are feeling as well”. The production team have expanded on this anachronistic aesthetic by mixing the 16th century Italian setting with elements from 1950s post-war Italy. That period, much like the aftermath of Romeo and Juliet’s suicides, is one in which society is supposed to be evolving, yet all the old structures are still in place, and no-one knows quite what they’re supposed to do with themselves any more.

Comic relief is provided by two Capulet boys with boastful, braggardly conversations, written with an ear for the bard and filled with wonderful non-sequiturs and played with a laddish teenage joie de vivre by Louis Wellings and Declan McElroy. Textbook approach. It’s the kind of move that Shakespeare himself might have gone for and she, oh she finishes it off with a hanky representing the blood. That is lovely. No need for fancy pants special effects and…The scenes are linked and interspersed by the very lovely peripatetic flute playing of Julia Gibb, with music composed by one of the Progresss resident music masters, Peter Charles. Presenter: Oh and an inspired touch! I don’t think anybody saw that shot coming! Super special effects skill from the director there. Well played my son! 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. All in all a lively and affecting performance of a play that might well, however, be less interesting if it wasnt already stood on the shoulders of a giant.

Indeed, it’s Anne who provides most of the wit, not just verbal but philosophical. And it’s Wolfe’s performance — capped with a roof-raising rendition of the Celine Dion hit “That’s the Way It Is” — that gives the show its heart, an organ too often unheard from in musicals entirely focused on the ear. The play centres on Rosaline, Juliet's cousin and Romeo's ex-flame. Ironically, Rosaline had been in love with Romeo, but was playing "hard to get". Tortured by the loss of her love, Rosaline has become a sullen, venomous woman. She actively seeks to be elected the 'Princess of Cats' and run the Capulet family.

After Juliet | Progress Youth Theatre | Reviewed on: Tuesday 11 March 2008 | Performances run until Saturday 15 March 2008 | Box office: 0118 9606060 With Shakespeare’s two most famous protagonists dead, playwright Sharman Macdonald shifts the spotlight onto Juliet’s cousin Rosaline, played by a fittingly sardonic Mary Butler. Rosaline, devastated by Romeo’s death (she was his first crush before Juliet entered the picture), seethes with bitter resentment – director Maddy Trépanier highlights the possible feminist readings of her character: Rosaline seems to be saying, “I’m just as crazy, disruptive, neurotic, obsessive, as any man – watch what I can do.” 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. 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. Baz Luhrman’s film of Romeo and Juliet with Clare Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio prompted Sharman Macdonald’s 13-year-old daughter Keira Knightley to tell her to write play about Rosaline. Undoubtedly Rosaline appears on stage in Romeo and Juliet and at the Capulet’s party but she is not in the cast list and, although Romeo is besotted with her in Act I Scene 1, she is only mentioned twice. The daughter's demand together with the film's electrifying music and the tough sinewy style that made the Shakespearean language a dialect that young people could use, led Sharman Macdonald to speculate on how she could explore what happened in the days immediately after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet.