Shakespeare finds new youth appeal
Does the Bard speak to the Dr Who generation? Richard McComb and daughters investigate.
Before our eyes, a terrified man is shackled to a pole, gagged and doused in petrol.
Armed thugs, their contorted faces smeared in grime, smash chains into the ground as they urge their gang leader to torch the victim. The captive’s eyes flash around in abject horror. Giant flames lick up through a grate. It’s like a torture scene from Reservoir Dogs.
Later, the heart-rending distress of a beautiful young bride, married in secret just hours earlier, throws our emotions in an entirely different direction.
Overcome by the death of her ill-fated lover, she plunges a dagger into her breast and lets out two blood-curdling screams.
This is edge of the seat stuff, visceral 3D-action. And my children are enthralled.
We are not sitting in a cinema auditorium watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster. The teenage vampire hit Twilight seems tame by comparison and Avatar cannot compete with these very special effects. This is the original sound and fury, the ultimate love story. It is, of course, Shakespeare.
We are four rows back from the front of the stage at The Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, watching Romeo and Juliet.
The actors storm down the aisles, just inches away. You can catch their scent, inhale the tension. We are in the heat of dramatic battle. I happen to be in an aisle seat, my legs crossed to the side, and I almost send Romeo flying as he rampages towards the stage. I’m pleased I don’t. The part is played with such physical anguish by Sam Troughton that I fear he would slit my throat.
Troughton’s acting lineage is of thematic interest. His grandfather, Patrick, was the second Dr Who. Juliet is played by the brilliant Mariah Gale, who was Ophelia to the new era’s tabloid Time Lord, David Tennant, in the RSC’s acclaimed Hamlet in 2008-09.
And this really is why I find myself at The Courtyard tonight, my two daughters by my side.
The RSC makes a great deal of its appeal to children and says it wants to bring down the barriers to the Bard for inquisitive, young minds.
So can it make Shakespeare relevant and, crucially, interesting, to the Dr Who generation?
After all, the playwright popped his clogs nearly 400 years ago and Romeo and Juliet was penned around 1595-96.
Is the RSC’s “mission statement” on ‘yoof’ merely fanciful PR tokenism, a move designed to assuage criticisms that the world’s most famous performance company is, ultimately, just a bastion of class elitism and privilege?
Shakespeare, if A-level and university studies serves me well, was a cunning dissector of the gulf between appearance and reality. I wonder what he would have made of the RSC’s child-friendly guise?
