Romeo & Juliet - Newquay Voice

Shakespeare came to Indian Queens with an outdoor performance of Romeo and Juliet on Thursday.

In Shakespeare's day plays were often performed outside and as Miracle Theatre Company's lead players were drawn to each other like moths to a flame, so were the bats, birds and moths circling above our night-time pre-play picnic.

The Elizabethan-style stage bareness used orange, pink and red wooden slats to build a bizarre castle set in the centre of Indian Queens Pit.

The characters used the grassy amphitheatre to their advantage, playing practical jokes on each other, and in one hilarious scene, Romeo hid behind a rather portly gentleman on one of the banks.

The characters, just like the set, were a strange mix of American-style gangsters, medieval monks and Italian beauties. The Capulets are quintessential 50s Italian socialites with slick hair and fur coats, while the Montagues are plaid shirt-wearing matadors.

Romeo and Juliet themselves were played with simplicity. They were romantic, but not sentimental, the hero less a reckless youth and more a desperate lover.

The biggest laughs came from supporting characters rather than the tragic twosome. Juliet's nurse, a shrill-voiced pantomime dame, was all innuendo. Mercutio, a cockney-accented woman built like Bob Hoskins, is great in his death throes, but brilliant as a cheeky geezer of Verona.

Paris, some sort of Germanic noble, teamed up with the straight character with an amusingly odd costume consisting of braces, lederhosen and a feathered hat.

The text, while faithful, has been edited to make the play shorter, funnier and more accessible than ever before. Scenes such as Juliet and her nurse preparing a rope ladder for Romeo's ascent into her wedding bedchamber, Mercutio and Benvolio arguing like lads about who is more easily baited into a fight, and the normally two-dimensional Paris valiantly defending his fiance's tomb, added a new understanding to complex dialogue.

The lovers' final scenes, always dramatic, were far darker than seen before. Gone is the romanticism of Lurhmann's candlelit shrine, in the dark minimalism of fading light, worm eaten corpses, Romeo dancing with dead Juliet and a crypt filled with desperately grieving lovers turning the play from comedy into total tragedy.

The coldness toward Tybalt's death, open talk of revenge and murder, Juliet's father mourrning the deflowering of his only child by untimely death, was stark and shocking.

The play will be moving throughout Cornwall during the summer and comes to Lusty Glaze Beach in Newquy on Thursday , July 8, starting at 7.30pm. Donya Todd