Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words (review)

Midway through Romeo and Juliet, Juliet, alone, longs to be reunited with her beloved:

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,Towards Phoebus' lodging. Such a wagonerAs Phaeton would whip you to the westAnd bring in cloudy night immediately.

(3.2.1–4)

The senses of hurry and urgency, neatly encapsulated in this soliloquy, are symptomatic of this play's broader concerns regarding time—time in the senses of both story and narrative. In his introduction to the Arden 3 edition, René Weis juxtaposes them, mapping, with a timeline, scenes and plot developments from Sunday morning to dawn on Thursday (25–7). "Nothing," he argues, "could be further from comedy than such a tightly plotted and exiguous time-scheme" (27). Michael Nunn and William Trevitt capitalize on time's potentialities in Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words, lending it new meanings. This sleek ballet production of Kenneth MacMillan's choreography clocks in at under ninety minutes and is performed by members of the Royal Ballet. The film is beyond words because it works without words. Even tighter than "the two hours' traffic of our stage" (Prologue 12) that the Chorus describes, this production's economy is thrown into sharp relief when compared with the usual length of a conventional stage production (i.e. over two-and-a-half hours). Nunn and Trevitt strip back on characters: the Chorus is a casualty, and Friar Laurence (Bennet Gartside) is less of a mentor to Romeo (William Bracewell) than he is a witness to their marriage and an aid to Juliet when she seeks to escape marriage with Paris (Tomas Mock).

Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words was shot on a backlot at Korda Film Studios in Etyek, a small village about an hour away from Budapest. The result is an imaginative, elegant, and visually stunning film wherein the star-crossed lovers come into even sharper focus. The opening is a case in point. Shakespeare's Romeo appears after the street fight in 1.1, and he confides in Benvolio the unreciprocated love that he feels towards Rosalind: he is "Out of her favour where I am in love" (1.1.166). By contrast, Romeo enters a minute into the film in active pursuit of Rosaline (Fumi Kaneko), who returns none of his clearly indicated feelings; his offering of a rose inspires her to make a quick departure—she will respond more favorably to one from Tybalt (Matthew Ball) later on—and Romeo's persistence prompts her to seek help from passersby. Where the start of Shakespeare's play finds Romeo melancholic and meditative, Nunn's and Trevitt's version is playful and flirtatious. We witness his growth from unsuccessful suitor into romantic hero, as he bears his soul figuratively and literally: he gradually strips away his excessive, flamboyant costumes and swaps them for a loose shirt when he fights Tybalt in the mud and rain. Bracewell, a First Soloist, proves more than equal to the task as he effortlessly realizes and effectively weaves together different elements of his character: Romeo, Mercutio (Marcelino Sambé), and Benvolio (James Hay) variously tease the Nurse (Romany Pajdak) when she is delivering Juliet's (Francesca Hayward) letter, the reading of which first transfixes and subsequently animates Romeo. The fight in 1.1 establishes the Montagues' and the Capulets' longstanding animosity—bodies pile up, much as they had in the past—but it is significant that Romeo is involved in the swordfight. Where Shakespeare's Chorus reveals the lovers "Doth with their death bury their parents' strife" (Prologue 8), Nunn and Trevitt emphasize his stakes—personal, familial, and social—in the conflict. His romance cannot be secondary to his family.

Hayward, a Principal, is a revelation as Juliet, and her talents as an actor and dancer find fuller expression here...