Shakespeare’s R&J, Southwark Playhouse, 31st July, 2008

This theatre is turning into one of my favourites.  I hope it's the theatre they provide, and not that I'm getting lazy.  Since it's at (well, under, actually) London Bridge, I can get the Cannon Street train, and avoid the stressful 'Lewisham Rush' required by the Victoria trains.  It's a little bit early, so I spend a little longer in the rather pleasant Shipwrights' Arms.  I have to be careful this doesn't impair my audience duties.  I've mentioned before that modern audiences don't always behave properly.  I would hate to find myself included in that criticism.

I hate people mucking about with Shakespeare.  Shakespeare is a very special theatrical experience: to enjoy it properly, I have to bone up on the play beforehand, so I know who's who, how they relate to each other, and what the story is.  Then I can really enjoy the language, which is what justifies Shakespeare in this day-and-age.  I decided to treat this as 'not-Shakespeare', based on the Flyer the Playhouse emailed.  I regretted that, because there was a lot of neat Shakespeare in the play, and I would have enjoyed it more if I had been more aware of its original location.

Plays like this make me bite my lip and inwardly chant my mantra: "There is no such thing as a bad theatrical experience, there is no such thing as a bad theatrical experience, … ".  I can only think that someone thought it would be a good idea to have schoolboys kissing (sexually) on stage, and came up with this weird construction to achieve it.  It had a lot of pseudo-catholic-boys school stuff at the start, which I couldn't relate to anything I experienced at my catholic boys school.  The main vehicle seemed to be a group of schoolboys reading R&J to each other, and the actors established the archetypal characters well.  Indeed it got quite boisterous at times.  Doing this underneath London Bridge Arches got them even dirtier that I got when I was that age.

But a lot of the time, it just turned into R&J with a cast of schoolboys, as the lines between the play, and the play-within-the-play, failed to hold.

To stay in the catholic-boy's-school setting, the cast got a B+, the production a B-, and the play itself a charitable C-.  I got an E for effort, and fell gratefully into the Shipwrights' Arms, without any fear of being snogged.