Emily Berry
posted 12 December 2006

Ah, Shakespeare’s universal themes. This heavily-stylised Korean take on the star-cross’d lovers tells their story in extended dance and martial arts sequences, a swirl of colourful silk and much grinning (and even some waving) at the audience. Although the presentation is obviously very different from a typical British production of Romeo and Juliet, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly challenging about the Mokhwa Repertory Company’s interpretation – they’re going by the book. 

The young couple are naïve and excitable, their parents authoritarian, Juliet’s nurse silly and tearful, Mercutio predictably camp – though why he delivers the Queen Mab speech from a bath in which he and Tybalt are both later slain is less clear. Ninety minutes of stick-fighting, maniacal grinning and wailing later, and love’s young dream is as suicidal as ever.

Fair enough if it’s not in director-dramatist Oh Tae-Suk’s remit to deliver a radical new version of the play – he’s bringing a different culture to it and that should be enough. I’m just always dying for someone to mess with the death scene – maybe one of them survives, but with terrible brain damage… or Juliet chickens out of killing herself, marries Paris and… But no. This production is all about movement and colour, and in that respect it’s very enjoyable. If you’re not too British to stomach the excessive grinning. And waving. There’s a hilarious almost slapstick scene which I guess is one way of showing the teen lovers getting down and dirty for the first and only time, in which Romeo accidentally gets all wound up in an enormous white silk sheet whilst trying to remove Juliet’s socks. She spends the next five minutes trying to untangle him, and they both sigh and moan with the effort of it. But you don’t find yourself feeling particularly wound up in turn when Romeo is torn away by the dawn.

Reading double-translated surtitles (from Shakespeare's English to Korean and back to a more standard but still poetic English) seems kind of odd, and with so much action onstage, tricky; in fact the play would have been perfectly comprehensible without them. However it’s hard not to think that the absence of language is a problem in a Shakespeare production when his plays are, more than anything, about words. We know the characters well enough to know where they’re coming from, but Oh Tae-Suk’s ritualised style means that we never get close enough to the characters to really be moved by them.

Run over.