The Guardian looks at a new Royal Shakespeare Company production of Romeo and Juliet:
But soft! What tweet through yonder iPhone breaks? It is the east, and @julietcap16 is the sun.
Actually, Juliet Capulet is probably offline at the moment: being only 16, she has to go to school even on her birthday, where to her indignation Twitter is banned. She’ll be back. And there’s a big party planned tonight that could change all their lives: does any of this sound at all familiar?
The Royal Shakespeare Company today joined with the cross-platform production firm Mudlark and Channel 4’s digital investment fund, 4iP, to launch Such Tweet Sorrow, a drama in real time and 4,000 tweets, very roughly based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
The Bard of Avon’s 1597 tragedy of flirty, street-fighting teenagers disastrously caught up in the double trauma of real love and their parents’ murderous small-town rivalries is already one of the most adapted of his works. It has been continuously reinvented as an opera, a ballet, a musical, a lesbian love story, a geriatric love story and even an ice show.
This time, Juliet is the daughter of a successful property developer. Her mother died in a car driven by the artist Montague; her father will no longer tolerate any of his works in the house, much less his son. Her brother Tybalt is well on his way to being expelled from his latest boarding school, and their older sister Jess, nicknamed Nurse, keeps well out of the way of their new stepmother.
I’m usually pretty conservative about “re-imagining” Shakespeare, but this sounds like an interesting performance.
Update, 13 April: Full story so far here.
Ah, but has it been done as a geriatric lesbian operatic musical ballet love story on ice?
That is the question.
Comment by Lickmuffin — April 12, 2010 @ 09:15
I saw Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) performed in Toronto many years ago. It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but it didn’t make me want to see too many more variations on the theme.
And I never look forward to anything “on Ice”, as a rule.
Comment by Nicholas — April 12, 2010 @ 09:39
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Pingback by Tweets that mention Updating Romeo & Juliet for the YouTube/Twitter generation « Quotulatiousness -- Topsy.com — April 12, 2010 @ 21:24