Rebecca Saire and Patrick Ryecart and quite interesting as the leads. Saire gives a very good interpretation of Juliet and owns her scenes. She is beautiful, and her costumes are affective. Wearing clothing patterned after authentic period costumes adds a lot. She looks a little like Elsa Lanchester in "Bride of Frankenstein" in the heavy full-length dress of the day. Ryecart uses a more contemporary style, along the lines of England in the era of the Beatles and the Stones while remaining intellectually honest. It is unusual now to have a Romeo not be a teen-dream. Saire and Ryecart have some, not a lot of, chemistry. What the actors accomplish is to bring to the fore some of the questions in the plot. Why do they think springing their marriage on their families in the middle of a vendetta will not be received with horror? Or why doesn't Friar Lawrence see the likely outcome? They try to out-Machiavellian the rulers of a renaissance Italian city-state and the outcome is also predicable. The play is not the romantic tragedy it is reputed to be.
Perhaps the production values could have been better if it had not been filmed in the style of a 1970s BBC program. Too many crane shots. The sets are variable. Very good background music in the credits and the musicians in the party scene are playing authentic instruments.
This performance is from the first two seasons of BBC Shakespeare and is shows the original purpose which seemed to be to sell the package to school libraries from class discussion. Later they did more original interpretations of the plays and some of the actors in this are in the later plays; Ryecart, Michael Hordern, and Vernon Dobtcheff are the ones I saw.
Perhaps the production values could have been better if it had not been filmed in the style of a 1970s BBC program. Too many crane shots. The sets are variable. Very good background music in the credits and the musicians in the party scene are playing authentic instruments.
This performance is from the first two seasons of BBC Shakespeare and is shows the original purpose which seemed to be to sell the package to school libraries from class discussion. Later they did more original interpretations of the plays and some of the actors in this are in the later plays; Ryecart, Michael Hordern, and Vernon Dobtcheff are the ones I saw.