Hello everyone.
This week I’d like to introduce to you Frey Kwa Hawking, a dramaturg and critic who is based in London. As is tradition with etude reviews, I gave Frey the choice to review whatever he wanted to, as long as it’s avaible to be watched at home or on the go.
Frey chose the National Theatre’s film production of Romeo and Juliet which you can rent here.
As always, this is a commisioned review thanks to your support via the ko-fi page. If you want to support etude and commision critics then please do drop us a few quid!
Hope you enjoy and this weeks selections will be below the review
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
review by Frey Kwa Hawking
The National Theatre was asleep, and it was dreaming of Romeo and Juliet. A production intended for the summer of 2020 was reimagined instead as a “film of the play”, and so needs to be treated as a film. Not an NT Live broadcast to cinemas or for streaming, not a filmed play at all. Directed by Simon Godwin and adapted by Emily Burns, one of its actors, Tamsin Greig, puts it like this: the theatre is a character which makes the story come to life in this group of actors, the building allowing the story to be told.
And this is the theatre. So what Romeo and Juliet is it we’re being offered, and what does it say about the National’s mid-pandemic stage-dreaming? What is it the National dreams?
REHEARSAL ROOM CLOTHES
Fisayo Akinade opens the door. He’ll be Mercutio. In his group comes Jessie Buckley, who’ll be Juliet. Josh O’Connor, who’ll be her Romeo, comes in a different batch. Everyone files in wearing rehearsal room clothes, muted colours, relaxed and comfortable. Shubham Saraf’s Benvolio wears a Henley. It all feels very Henley. The bell rings as the company’s getting together their props, and something like the stage’s fire curtain draws over the bustling.
We’re tight in on Lucian Msamati’s face doing the prologue: it’s conspiratorial, he’s telling this company what to do. Buckley and O’Connor, or Juliet and Romeo - actor-characters? - smile at each other, fond. At “Two hours’ traffic of our stage,” there’s our first burst of quick cutting close-up moments from the later film: hands, poison, letter, blood, clasping. Then they all stand and get to it.
The film’s reliance on this kind of cutting in quick montage is overemphatic for such a drastically streamlined project (it feels as if about thirty to forty per cent of usual Romeo and Juliet versions is used, on which, more later) and these moments are often given to Juliet. “I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins / That almost freezes up the heat of life,” she says, and we see glimpses of shots to come: waking with her hand on his already-cooling arm, and a knife bloodied from her suicide. The effect is utter solemnity, deadly seriousness. There shouldn’t be even a moment of hoping that things might be different, here.
It makes for an odd effect coupled with the film’s metatheatricality - its unsettled attitude towards itself, how Tamsin Greig describes it. It can't be written off as a framing device, the film's editing makes a lot of it. In the dark of the Capulets’ ball, everyone masked, silked and suited, the couple stood close to each other and the camera in even closer, after “And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss”, what we see is both Romeo and Juliet at the ball, but intercut with the two chasing each other in the barer, backstage set of the prologue, alone and giddy, dressed down again. Those rehearsal room clothes.
We see it again, later, like a reminder of impossible good times which we never quite got to see, because the film is cagey about if they happened. If they did, do the actor-characters love to tell this story? Is there fondness? If there’s fondness, who are these actor-characters and why are they doing this together? Can you rehearse for a tragedy which keeps telling itself and still have
it be this serious? What horror does this wreak on those who have to do it, or are they unaware of the aesthetics, structure, and even medium of their result?
PLEASE DON’T LOOK AWAY
The photography of Romeo and Juliet is pretty, but also feels very still. There’s a sex montage of soundless gasps and real pores - I wonder how they would have done it onstage. It’s very Joe Wright (remember his 2012 Anna Karenina film with an eye to the stage?): all in service of Buckley and O’Connor’s faces, blue corridors, everything feels very clean. I find the use of focus more difficult to swallow. A soft fuzz envelops the faces of some actors while bigger characters (bigger stars) talk - you can’t choose to look elsewhere. Does the National know it’s dreaming like this? Do the actor-characters?
Tamsin Greig’s Lady Capulet is powerfully served by this version and its collapsing of her with the largely redundant - but still present - Lord Capulet, but other characters fare less well. Deborah Findlay’s Nurse is so good in her very few minutes, as is David Judge as Tybalt. I’m able to gather that Msamati’s Friar is strict. (Adrian Lester? I barely saw ‘er.) It makes it feel like the film wants to stare you straight down the barrel of the story’s gun, but really worries you’ll look away.
When comedy isn’t dreamed of at all, one character remains unformed. A Fisayo Akinade Mercutio is a gift, cruelly withheld from us here. Mercutio’s gay, great - but perfunctorily, because the film isn’t interested in a sense of Verona (even a Verona which is the National!) or the young people outside the couple. His slashed Queen Mab speech is shown to us largely side-on, so that they can have Romeo nearly always in shot, and you can’t see his face too well: he’s not lit with as much care as O’Connor. You can’t get drawn in, we’re kept at such a distance. It’s frankly outside the interest of this film, but they were too timid to cut it. His conjuring lines after the ball take a few seconds only.
The blood we see looks very convincing, but why’s it being shed at all? It’s the way the dream goes. Kiss Benvolio for a fraction of your few minutes, and then die.
GONE-OFF SANDWICHES
The balcony scene’s lit by a big stage moon; when Juliet and Romeo awake after their only night together there’s birdsong and a day-resembling light, and the sound of agitated gravel as he runs off into exile. Exile in this film is a non-stage part of the National, a long strip of window - showing real daylight, I think we’re meant to believe - and empty corridors.
What I’m dreaming of is a slightly sillier, goofy-horrific and roaming Romeo and Juliet which has Romeo hiding out in a lift, boys cruising each other and dying in the front of house toilets. Friar Lawrence makes his tincture for Juliet from old cafe coffee and gone-off sandwiches, because the actors are running out of options but Romeo and Juliet still have to die their story. Those
staircases, the broad balconies outside overlooking London - what about the real moon? When do you deserve outside light, when stage light?
There’s a slight sense of the sets becoming more substantial and real, as the play progresses (and becomes even more grim and serious). It’s not uniform, though: the Capulets’ home becomes more substantial, but Tybalt dies up in the flies, public space. Juliet takes her vial to induce sleep with the actor-characters watching, in her bedroom but not her bedroom, backstage space instead, surrounded by fuzzy faces. But not all heightened moments are given this treatment, nor does it straightforwardly disintegrate, either. At the end, with all the realer sets gone again, everyone looks at Romeo and Juliet lying on some steel deck in the middle of them, even if they themselves are dead. And then there’s another montage. I don’t think we need it. Do they?
Why are these actor-characters only inside, mostly in stage-spaces? Do they confine themselves there, or is it the theatre? Can’t it be somewhere else? Can’t it be different? If you’re representing all this agency? (Where’s the Simon Godwin-character?) When Msamati is doing the prologue, the company aren’t in a full circle - there’s space for the camera. Do they know what it’s there for? This Romeo and Juliet is brief, swooning, claustrophobic, solemn. It’s serviceable. It has faces. Big ones.
I don’t think the story knows why it’s telling itself, which is a problem because the telling is pointed out as if it matters. Outside the film, I know why the National does this story and why the actors do. Within the film, I don’t know why they do this story together, if the doing goes like this.
GET ON THE INTERNET Curated by Varjack-Lowry
pay what you can
Monday 1st until Saturday 5th March
Varjack-Lowry return to Omnibus Theatre, following Autumn Season 2021’s smash digital hit iMelania (★★★★ The Stage), to curate a festival of full-throttle female-identified fabulousness.
Get On The Internet! is a week long festival celebrating and showcasing some of Varjack-Lowry’s art babe faves based in the UK, Germany, Australia, Greece and the USA, in the run up to International Women’s Day.
The programme is jam packed full of online and hybrid events, including opportunities for a glimpse into the working process of 5 fabulous artists and companies taking up hybrid residencies at Omnibus Theatre; Aba Naia, Catherine Duquette, Jemima Yong, Simone French and Hot Cousin.
Throughout the week there will be performances and online content by Louise Orwin, Silvia Mercuriali, Fast Familiar, Ira Brand, The Demolition Project, and Sue Mayo.
Varjack-Lowry will also be running a workshop as well as presenting new and previously unseen work
To round up the festival, there will be a hybrid screening party featuring work by Luca Rutherford, Shebekeke, Francesca Pazniokas, Eliza Soroga, Emma Ready and more!
Mystery Trip by Nigel Barret and Louise Mairi
from Saturday 5th March
from £1
We don’t know what we’re doing.
We don’t know where we’re going.
But we do know that we need to get out of here.
Come with us
Mystery Trip is an epic digital excursion created by pioneering theatre mavericks Nigel Barrett & Louise Mari in collaboration with disability and welfare rights activist Kerry Underhill and a gang of people confined to their homes due to chronic health conditions.
On three consecutive Saturdays in March our online coach will offer you a unique live mystery trip – each one stopping at different surprise destinations. All from the comfort of your own home.
Bring a sandwich.
Assemblage by Merce Cunningham
available now
free
Assemblage is a recently rediscovered film produced for broadcast by San Francisco's public television station KQED in November 1968. Created in collaboration with director and former dancer Richard Moore, the film features Cunningham dancing with early dance company members in a public "happening" in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square. Conceived from the beginning as a dance staged for the camera, the performance is amplified by Moore's special effects and complemented with a soundtrack by John Cage, David Tudor and Gordon Mumma.
A testament to Cunningham's groundbreaking investigations of dance and movement within the virtual spaces of film, Assemblage presents a dance that unfolds across fractured space and inside shattered time. Cunningham explained that "the finished film [would] deal not so much with dance in the narrow sense, but with various motions - boats moving, people walking, and, of course, groups dancing." On screen, Cunningham's dancers walk, frolic, and scramble through the shopping concourses and promenades of the square.
The soundtrack, assembled contemporaneously by Cage, Tudor and Mumma, was likewise comprised of concrete sounds mostly recorded on-site around San Francisco.Cunningham and his company spent three weeks rehearsing and filming on location in fall 1968, creating what Moore described as "movement modules." From these sequences, Moore and film editor Bill Yahraus crafted a motion picture collage of overlapping movements and moments, which occur sometimes in fragmented film windows, sometimes within superimposed planes.
Moore used extensive optical illusion and process photography, dancers were filmed as silhouettes and superimposed on different backgrounds. In one composited sequence, Cunningham's company becomes a miniaturized troupe of Lilliputian dancers, weaving in and out of the dancing legs of gigantic versions of themselves.
Rediscovered after Cunningham's death, the restored Assemblage was transferred and colorized the film from the original 16mm prints by filmmaker Charles Atlas, a longtime collaborator on Cunningham's dance films.
Thats everything for this week. I’m currently moving house so everything may be a bit slow on my end for the next few weeks. Just a heads up.
Cheers
Josh x