After Juliet

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She eventually tries to reignite the feud and clashes swords with Benvolio, who is her current Montague admirer. Luke Nicholson, gives nice life to this character, caught in a hard place.

Her angry tirade to Juliet at the lovers tomb is wonderful, and reminiscent of Brian Patten's poem, A Few Questions About Romeo – "Could he still have drunk that potion had he known / without her the world still glowed / and love was not confined / in one shape alone? … Poor Romeo, poor Juliet, poor human race".

The Girl With Red Hair (2003) has been highly acclaimed. Once again, it explores mother-daughter love in a Scottish coastal setting, though this time it is more tragic: 17-year-old Roslyn, the red-headed girl of the title, has been killed in a car accident a year previously, and the play explores not only the devastating grief of her mother, but the impact on the whole community. The intensity of the subject-matter is lightened by touches of humour and the gradual suggestion that the bereaved may begin to heal, learn to love again and move forward with their lives.

The two lovers are dead and the Prince has forced peace upon the two households, the Capulets and the Montagues, but as everyone knows too well an enforced truce is barely a truce at all. Macdonald's daughter Keira Knightley appeared in the Heatham House Youth Centre's NT Connections production, which made the regional finals. [4] This performance seemed somewhat confused between its Renaissance and more modern setting Jonah WalkerThe scenes are linked and interspersed by the very lovely peripatetic flute playing of Julia Gibb, with music composed by one of the Progresss resident music masters, Peter Charles. The play centres on Rosaline, Juliet's cousin and Romeo's ex-flame. Ironically, Rosaline had been in love with Romeo, but was playing "hard to get". Tortured by the loss of her love, Rosaline has become a sullen, venomous woman. She actively seeks to be elected the 'Princess of Cats' and run the Capulet family.

Comic relief is provided by two Capulet boys with boastful, braggardly conversations, written with an ear for the bard and filled with wonderful non-sequiturs and played with a laddish teenage joie de vivre by Louis Wellings and Declan McElroy. Shakespeare situates this maturation directly after Juliet’s wedding night, linking the idea of development from childhood to adulthood with sexual experience. Indeed, Juliet feels so strong that she defies her father, but in that action she learns the limit of her power. Strong as she might be, Juliet is still a woman in a male-dominated world. One might think that Juliet should just take her father up on his offer to disown her and go to live with Romeo in Mantua. That is not an option. Juliet, as a woman, cannot leave society; and her father has the right to make her do as he wishes. Though defeated by her father, Juliet does not revert to being a little girl. She recognizes the limits of her power and, if another way cannot be found, determines to use it: for a woman in Verona who cannot control the direction of her life, suicide, the brute ability to live or not live that life, can represent the only means of asserting authority over the self. The strength of the above performances highlighted the weakness in others, for which I have to cast another stone at the Directors, by not paying attention to characterisation and to the drama itself. Tara Quinn had the lion's share of dialogue, but failed to live up to it. Her long speeches were monotonous and needed much more variation and impetus; she has presence in abundance, and the fight scene was a real bonus, but she must pay more attention to what she is saying, and also to watch her diction. Miriam Early as Bianca was inaudible for most of the evening, and surely the Directors must bear some portion of the blame for this, because although the feeling was there, we just couldn't hear it! They don’t even bother to hide the jukebox. It’s right there, out in the open, before the show starts: a chrome Cyclops glowering at you from the stage of the Stephen Sondheim Theater, of all places. After Capulet and Lady Capulet storm away, Juliet asks her nurse how she might escape her predicament. The Nurse advises her to go through with the marriage to Paris—he is a better match, she says, and Romeo is as good as dead anyhow. Though disgusted by her nurse’s disloyalty, Juliet pretends to agree, and tells her nurse that she is going to make confession at Friar Lawrence’s. Juliet hurries to the friar, vowing that she will never again trust the Nurse’s counsel. If the friar is unable to help her, Juliet comments to herself, she still has the power to take her own life.A 2009 youth, stage version of the show featured Valentine as the twin sister of Mercutio; this added an extra storyline where Valentine is in love with Benvolio and is jealous of Rosaline. Benvolio's final scene ends with Valentine running off stage after his rejection. Just before dawn, Romeo prepares to lower himself from Juliet’s window to begin his exile. Juliet tries to convince Romeo that the birdcalls they hear are from the nightingale, a night bird, rather than from the lark, a morning bird. Romeo cannot entertain her claims; he must leave before the morning comes or be put to death. Juliet declares that the light outside comes not from the sun, but from some meteor. Overcome by love, Romeo responds that he will stay with Juliet, and that he does not care whether the Prince’s men kill him. Faced with this turnaround, Juliet declares that the bird they heard was the lark; that it is dawn and he must flee. After Juliet is a play written by Scottish playwright Sharman Macdonald. [1] It was commissioned for the 2000 [2] Connections programme, in which regional youth theatre groups compete to stage short plays by established playwrights.

She is also the author of two novels, The Beast (1986) and Night Night (1988), and wrote the screenplay for Wild Flowers (1989) for Channel 4 Television and the BBC Radio play Sea Urchins (1998). A further radio play, Gladly My Cross Eyed Bear, was broadcast in 1999. She wrote the libretto to Hey Persephone!, performed at Aldeburgh with music by Deirdre Gribbin. Juliet is passionate when she first meets Romeo. She kisses him when they first meet, and later on, in the famous balcony scene, she declares her love for him. Romeo requests that Juliet declares her love for him and Juliet simply replies that she has already done so. This shows how loving and passionate she is, as she has given her love and heart to Romeo.

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Most of the comedy derives from similar tensions; though “& Juliet” is jokey, and its authorship is entirely male, its feminist critique is real enough, winking alternately at Shakespeare’s assumptions and ours. At one point, Anne summarily up-ages Juliet by about a decade because she’s “not going clubbing with a 13-year-old” — nor (it goes unsaid) letting a 13-year-old marry.