Shakespeare’s legendary lovers avoid tragedy but collide with middle age in Juliet & Romeo
In Lost Dog’s witty mix of dance, comedy, and theatre at The Cultch, the famous couple have to contend with everything the rest of us do, including the pressures of their own myths about love
Juliet & Romeo. Photo by Tristram Kenton
The Cultch presents Juliet & Romeo at the Historic Theatre from April 29 to May 3
BY NOW, WE ARE all too familiar with the tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet. Boy meets girl. The two fall in love. Despite their families’ feud, they marry in secret. And by the end of the play—by poison or dagger—they’re both dead.
“Thus with a kiss I die.”
Well, not this time.
In Juliet & Romeo, produced by U.K. company Lost Dog, creator and director Ben Duke takes the iconic star-crossed couple’s fate and spins it on its head.
“It’s a story about these two characters that you know, but it is not the story that you know,” Duke tells Stir.
Like many of us, Duke studied the famous Shakespeare tragedy in school. But it wasn’t until he saw a production of the show by the Royal Shakespeare Company that he was genuinely and deeply moved.
“Why traumatize a whole load of teenagers? Why do we encourage teenagers to study this play and then make them go watch it? It’s awful,” Duke says.
As a teenager himself at the time, Duke couldn’t understand why Shakespeare needed to end the play in a double suicide when, in his eyes, the couple had gotten “tantalizingly close” to a happy ending.
Duke recalls that when he “got older and understood a bit more about life and about dramatic forms, it kind of made sense”.
“But that teenage dissatisfaction stayed with me,” he adds.
In watching Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Duke admired how Luhrmann played with the couple’s final moments, without breaking the confines of the existing story. In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio (Romeo) and Claire Danes (Juliet) share one final look in the moments before they die. It inspired Duke to put his own spin on the tale and rewrite the fates of the young lovers, saving them from their tragic end.
“I thought, ‘Well, why can’t we do that?’ Shakespeare wouldn’t mind; he was all about rewriting existing stories. So I thought I would have a go,” he says.
And so Juliet & Romeo was developed. In this version—starring John Kendall and Emily Terndrup–we find the famous couple aged up. They’re now in their 40s, having a little bit of a mid-life crisis and feeling immense pressure to live up to the legendary status of their teenage selves.
“I wanted them to be older, to have a child, and to have hit a moment in their relationship where something has to give,” Duke says. “It is the moment, I think, when couples break up or they renegotiate the terms of the relationship—the terms they unwittingly agreed to in the early phases of their love.”
Oh, yes. Just because Romeo and Juliet survived their adolescence, they aren’t automatically given a happy ending.
As Duke explains: “I think that the story of Romeo and Juliet plays a big part of the myths we have generated about love.” We all have a habit of falling for these myths—it turns out Romeo and Juliet themselves aren’t immune.
Juliet & Romeo. Photo by Tristram Kenton
Through Lost Dog’s signature marriage of dance, comedy, and theatre, the pair get to work out their marital issues not only through text, but through movement.
“I love the problems of movement and text existing together, as they are very different performance modes and they demand different things from the audience,” Duke says. “But for me, the movement allows us to get into the more abstract realm of memory and the emotional landscapes of these characters. We tend to prioritize words, and especially in England—possibly because of Shakespeare—it feels like the word is king. And so to disrupt that with movement feels important. Words have given us a sense of clarity and rationality that I think is a lie. So I hope the movement in this show gives us a different lens through which to see Romeo and Juliet.”
Juliet & Romeo has travelled across the UK, to Australia, Italy, China, and now, for the first time, Canada. They’ll start in Ontario, come to B.C., and finish the tour in the Northwest Territories.
“We’re very excited to come to Canada,” Duke says. “I hope that audiences are able to find something of their own experiences in the show—a moment of recognition from their own relationship history.” 
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