Close-up shots support the emotional content of the story, particularly in scenes between the young lovers. In combination with these elements, the adaptation makes good use of film’s advantages. In that moment, these elements are everything to them, all that matters, their whole world. There is only the moon, the balcony, the boy on a ladder and the girl he wants, and yet in the film this isn’t a case of sparseness, but of fullness. In the balcony scene, the bright image of the full moon provides a stunning backdrop while tipsy Romeo sets up a ladder to reach his new love.

There’s some great set design and lighting: a sea of church candles on the ground around Romeo and Juliet illuminates their wedding Romeo’s banishment places him in a cell-like room, an unwelcoming industrial space with high windows. From the outset, then, Romeo & Juliet (starring Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor in the lead roles) shows an awareness of its artificiality, its status as a made piece of art layered with choices.Īfter the prologue, the film mostly moves away from self-referential staging, instead using theatrical elements to suggest a stylish and dreamlike fantasy world. This new production from the National Theatre – a TV film recorded in a theatre and making use of both theatrical and filmic elements – opens in a “rehearsal room” set where the actors sit together to hear the prologue, in imitation of a table read.

Rather than the choices made by the play’s characters, or even its author, it’s the choices of actors, directors, and producers which are at stake when it is performed today. As a reviewer, too, there’s little purpose in assessing the narrative content of Shakespeare’s text, of wondering whether Juliet perhaps should have run away with Romeo, thus saving a considerable amount of fuss and a fair few lives.

It’s been done a million times over, so if you’re going to make a Romeo and Juliet there’s pretty much no point playing by the book. It’s an ingrained cultural touchstone, quoted and misquoted everywhere, somehow a pinnacle of romance despite the fact that it’s about a relationship that lasts less than a week and the play leaves bodies strewn across the stage. The story of “Juliet and her Romeo” is the best-known of all Shakespeare’s plays. In a sentence: Light on Shakespeare’s script but big on visual appeal, this dynamic production brings the romantic tragedy to the small screen in a contemporary-feeling adaptation.

Romeo and juliet parody play script