Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as the titular horny teens. Photo: PBS In an interview with the Folger Shakespeare Library about his film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, the director Simon Godwin described the tragedy as a “plague play.” A plague play? I checked the title. Was he still talking about Shakespeare’s horniest teen tragedy? Stabbings and poison are the main dangers in Shakespeare’s story, and the star-crossed Veronese only wear masks when they’re going to a masquerade.
First, though, the film starts with the full cast, 14 people in rehearsal clothes, sitting together on the prop-strewn stage. They are getting ready, and they soon launch into a dry run of the show’s first fight scene. As a few men mark the swordplay with wooden batons, the other cast members look on placidly. Suddenly, an actor takes an unplanned swing, pulls a real knife, and the ensemble erupts — “Hey! Hey!” they cry, swarming forward to pull the two quarreling performers apart.
You’d think a pared-down script of such a well-known play would be a highlights reel, a page from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. But Godwin and his adapter, Emily Burns, take their razor to the most recognizable lines: Almost every couplet is out , and light no longer breaks soft through yonder window. The naughty Nurse and Mercutio don’t make the dirty jokes that your English teacher had to explain — their puns are all cut. The show is thus emotionally familiar but textually surprising.
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