'Romeo & Juliet' Theatre Review

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Beth Lloyd

‘Romeo & Juliet’ Theatre Review

Romeo and Juliet is a romantic play based on two people’s desire to spend their lives together, but it doesn’t exactly turn out exactly as they would have liked. The Black Cat Company showed this William Shakespeare production to us on Friday the 20th of October.

This play is nearly split in half at the beginning, there are two groups of people both completely different, The Capulet’s and The Montague’s. Romeo a good-looking working class young man is a Montague and always will be, he falls for a beautiful women Juliet and everything is fine until he finds out that she is a Capulet. After sneaking around Romeo is banished from the city of Verona for killing Tybalt a Capulet. Whilst Juliet is forced to marry a gentleman (by her parents) she does not want to go through with it. She then gets her hands on a potion that made her sleep for 48 hours. Her parents find her the next morning and think she passed away in the night. Romeo hears his beloved Juliet is dead and buys very strong poison; he goes to where Juliet’s body is and drinks it. Juliet wakes up and after seeing Romeo’s body she kills herself.

The set they used was very simple, set out on stage left was a table with a flowery cloth on it, in the centre of the stage was a black box making it look quite simple and old fashioned, this had a sword in it, at the back was obviously a backdrop, where the actors changed and also was a music player. The music was very carefully chosen and really set a goof atmosphere, the costumes made it very obvious of the time this played would have taken place. The lighting was very basic; there were no special lighting effects at all.

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The characters really made an effort to involve the audience, their diction was also very clear. The narrator spoke very well and told the story very interestingly. Tybalt made it very clear that he was a ‘baddy’ his anger came across well and also had very good stage presence. Benvolio had very good facial expressions and all around body movement, interesting to watch when he was on stage. Romeo was on stage nearly at all times he was a good actor that moved well across the stage, the tension between him and Juliet came across very well, he showed clearly ...

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