LANGUAGE OF LOVE
Recently landed: Language of Love
Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet especially for Fjord Review.
A lot can happen in a handful of days. You can find your Romeo or Juliet. Make a declaration of eternal love. You can be impetuous for nightfall. You can be drawn into a portentous duel in a market place. You can come up against history and a family feud that has little to do with you. You can be sentenced to exile. You can be grief-stricken. It can all end in the Capulet family crypt.
Shakespeare compressed months into days, and John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet compresses time further, into 154 minutes with two intervals. To Shakespeare’s double time[i] Cranko winds the clock faster still, and so, after nineteen years, Romeo and Juliet returns to the State Theatre, Melbourne, with all the joyous, “breathless rapidity of incidents”[ii] you’d expect. Such haste on the stage, then and now.
Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet premiered in the same year that Peggy van Praagh founded the Australian Ballet in 1962. The company first performed Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet in 1974, and Jürgen Rose’s all things bright and dim set design reflects the contrast between light and dark, day and night, that is entwined in the classic tale. Cranko’s swirling and gridded clusters of people in large gatherings from Market Place to Ballroom are shown in contrast with the intimacy and ultimate tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, making the stolen moments they share together all the more tender and urgent. The unusual frequency of events in Romeo and Juliet makes it ripe for dance: everything is moving and everything is movement.
[i] Raymond Chapman, ‘Double Time in Romeo and Juliet’, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Jul., 1949), pp. 372–374, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3717655, accessed 12th October, 2022.
[ii] William Watkiss Lloyd, ‘Essays on the life and plays of Shakespeare’ (London: C. Whittingham, 1958), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.319510022970636, accessed 12th October, 2022.
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1st October, 2022
The Australian Ballet’s Callum Linnane and Sharni Spencer in Romeo and Juliet (image credit: Rainee Lantry)
