Thanks for much for taking the time to chat with us; if you wouldn’t mind first introducing yourself and letting us know your role within the production.
I’m Salvador Kent, and I’m directing the show.
How is your production of Romeo & Juliet reimagining Shakespeare’s classic story for a modern audience?
Our production is not so much a reimagination of this text, but a translation. We’ve taken what we feel to be the emotional kernels of the work, discussed how an Elizabethan might have taken it, and translated the work to create these same sensations and instincts in next week’s Edinburgh audience.
Every decision we’ve made is contingent on the text itself. This is not to say we’re being ‘traditional’, we’ve ended up with a broad aesthetic that incorporates Bosch’s paintings, Rimbaud’s poems, Surrealist images. But these are images that rhyme with the instincts we have sensed in the text, and will hopefully create interesting associations for our audience.
What thematic elements are you emphasizing most—love, conflict, fate, or family—and how are those choices shaping your direction?
Rather than emphasising what we think is a cultural idea of Romeo & Juliet, luscious romance, wistful figures, pretty dreams — we’ve tried to dig into what we think is closer to the heart of this text. It is a text with dangerous romance, sharp figures, disturbing dreams. Romeo is sometimes portrayed with a sort of sweetness, to us he is angular, and melancholic as a constant condition rather than simply ‘sad’. Laurence is only the happy Friar until he becomes a political opportunist, the Nurse a fully formed human being rather than simple comic relief. These are all ideas not traditionally associated with this story, but that we can sense within it, and we intend to tackle this play head on rather than shape it to our preconceived notions of it.
Our company has drawn the conclusion that Romeo & Juliet is fundamentally a play about oppositions, and most of all the opposition between love and violence. Some scholars have called it an ambivalent play, and to ‘yes and’ this instinct I think it is a play of oxymorons. Oxymoron is not to say this versus that, but more an intimate tangling of conflicting ideas. This is the way we can best explain Romeo & Juliet’s intense relationship. Juliet’s desire is life tangled with Romeo’s desire for death. But even this is complex. Juliet desires life but wishes for Romeo’s dead body to be cut out into little stars, a violent image. Romeo desires death but his final dream imagines Juliet kissing his lips to resurrect him. Their essences melt into one, from the first touch of palms to their final dead embrace, and one part of the couple complicates the other.
There is also a conflict between the masculine and the feminine in this play, explored by the dynamics brought by Mercutio, and then by those in the Capulet household. Mercutio represents a bawdy, violent masculinity and he realises his desires in cheaply pragmatic ways, through surface level sexuality. Capulet is the head of a broken household that has subjugated the women in it, and the play sees him lose control of this household as he gets more violent towards those in it. His is a pitiful character that turns sinister, as many men do when they don’t get what they want.
Key to the direction of all of these conflicts has been constructing tight psychological performances that do not seek to impose our morals, but to understand the characters psychologies, no matter how disturbing. An audience will moralise, and it is their right, but an actor’s job is to understand psychologies different from theirs. Shakespeare’s writing builds fully fleshed human beings that need to be understood as fully as we can muster. These performances have been created with as much detail as we could manage, trying to get to the heart of what these characters could be feeling.
Can you describe your approach to casting Romeo and Juliet, and how the chosen actors bring fresh depth to these iconic roles?
Auditions were a long process, but Edinburgh student theatre has a lot of exciting talent emerging from it, so it was a pleasure to work through applications and we had to come to very difficult decisions. Our 21-strong-company have worked on previous EUTC shows, taken their work to Fringe, and are enormously exciting to watch. They have been dedicated and intelligent, so it’s really exciting to present their work to you next week.
On the question of fresh depth, I love this T.S. Eliot quote “Every generation is wrong about Shakespeare in a new way”. I think this is a new generation presenting our ‘wrong’, our performances that riff off this classic.
What design decisions—set, costume, lighting, or sound—are central to creating your version of Verona onstage?
Our designer, Ben Kay has been one of the most important voices in this process. Our conversations have constructed Verona from scratch (I’ve talked about this elsewhere), in the same way Shakespeare imagined his Verona. It’s a Verona which is pulled from Edinburgh more than anywhere, because we have designed it whilst walking the streets of Edinburgh. Still, we’re aware it’s a play set in summer. Our Verona has summers where it’s boiling hot at noon and icy cold at night. Trenchcoats are layered over shirts in the evening, and thrust off when the sun starts beating. Mary Angelique Boyd has designed costumes for this world.
It is a play with a central masquerade ball, so we had Moira Hamilton making masks inspired by the Bosch painting, Garden of Earthly Delights. This is an ideal work to map onto an Elizabethan play, because works from this period often use the three levelled structure of the Elizabethan Theatre to negotiate the relationship between Heaven, Earth and Hell.
One of our first images was a strand of light on a tombstone. This has stayed present throughout. Our Romeo & Juliet is entirely built from a strand of light on a tombstone… a place of death, a moment of light. Our lighting designer Jack Read has helped build this world.
This is a really exciting set and technical team filled with brilliant creatives in their own right, I’m very proud to have everyone involved on the team.
How are you handling the play’s most dramatic moments, such as the balcony scene and the final tragedy, in ways that feel both authentic and innovative?
Without spoiling it, these two moments have been some of the most thought about in the process. These are two key moments as one is the height of the play’s life, and the other the height of its death. I wouldn’t want to claim we’ve been innovative, I think that’s for others to decide, but these are two moments that have moved me most, and are the reason I’m tackling this play.
Maybe I’ll answer your question with a question: How might we evoke the end in an orchard full of birdsong? How might we evoke birdsong in a scene about the end?
In what ways are you making Shakespeare’s language more accessible to today’s audiences without losing its poetic integrity?
Another key figure to this process is Rebecca Mahar, who has not only directed our fights and intimacy, but was also our dramaturg. The process began with a two week long ‘Shakespeare Gym’ in which we covered the fundamentals of blank verse, metre, voice and breath and how to understand and translate text. All our company, no matter how small their part, has been asked to translate their role in a way which works for them and allows them best to understand it, so we can ultimately attempt to embody the verse.
I think the great joy of blank verse is if the company puts the effort into making it legible, it is accessible to an audience. Good Shakespeare is legible and appeals to everyone, regardless of where they’re from, and this process has been about trying to make good Shakespeare. You can have your cake and eat it in this way, by respecting the language’s poetic integrity, you make it accessible.
EUSC: Romeo & Juliet runs at The Pleasance Theatre from February 9th – 13th
Photo credit – Rae Philips-Smith
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