Global theatre

Andrew Gumbel

The scene is the Capulet family tomb in Verona. Young Juliet lies inside, pale as death from a potion she has been given by the faithful Friar Lawrence. Her brand-new husband, Romeo, thinks she is really dead, and he has arrived with a vial of poison in his pocket, determined to follow her to the hereafter.

So far, so familiar – at least to anyone who has ever read or sat through a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But then Romeo encounters Paris, his rival for Juliet’s love, and the dialogue begins to sound less than entirely Shakespearean.

“Stop right there, Montague!” Paris cries. “What the devil do you think you’re doing now?”

As he does in the Shakespeare original, Romeo tries to shake Paris off without resorting to violence. Only now he sounds more like a displaced character from a Noel Coward comedy than an Elizabethan tragic hero. “Be a good chap and run along,” he says. “Be a good fellow!”

Moments later, Romeo bursts into a song called One Kiss, before drinking the poison and dying. As the play reaches its climax and the bodies pile up, the surviving characters gather on stage for a strangely jaunty musical finale entitled Rock’n’Rolling Romeo.

This is not, to put it mildly, the version of the play usually endorsed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. And that’s precisely the point.

It is part of the script being staged in Dubai over the next few days by a British-based company called Shakespeare 4 Kidz. This is not, strictly speaking, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare at all, but rather Romeo & Juliet: The Musical, by Julian Chenery and Matt Gimblett. They have adapted half a dozen of the Bard’s better-known works. (Shakespeare gets a co-writing credit, but no more than that.)

The idea is to take some of the abstruse or unfamiliar language out of the Shakespeare original and make the whole thing more accessible, especially to school-age children who might otherwise encounter the Bard in the less than scintillating confines of a classroom and find him either boring, incomprehensible, or both.

The rock-boppy music is heavily influenced by recent hit shows on Broadway and London’s West End. The vocabulary, meanwhile, has been pared down and modernised so it should be accessible to the average 10-year-old. A few choice lines of Shakespeare’s have survived intact – the ones most familiar from the quotation books – but the rest has been subjected to some pretty severe red-pencil.

The whole thing seems like an open invitation to incense and outrage Shakespeare purists. (They might want to invoke the words of Anthony Lane, the scabrously witty film critic at The New Yorker magazine, who watched Hollywood massacre everything from Shakespeare to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Charles Dickens a few years ago and concluded: “Thou hast to be kidding.”)

But it is also enjoying an undeniable success. Shakespeare 4 Kidz has been in business for 15 years, putting on shows in schools and local communities across Britain and offering performance kits – complete with music CDs, script and teacher’s notes – so schools can mount their own productions.

For the past three years, the company has also toured abroad. Two years ago, Shakespeare 4 Kidz brought its version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Dubai, and last year it performed Hamlet in Abu Dhabi. There is even talk of a possible film deal involving a production company in the Gulf.

The man behind the venture, Julian Chenery, is a former stockbroker from Surrey, in the far south London suburbs, who suffered his own dose of Shakespeare phobia when he was at school in the early 1970s. “When we were taught Shakespeare it was almost like studying a foreign language,” he said. “We went through it, explaining it line by line rather than acting it out and staging it. In my case, it was not an enjoyable experience.”

Chenery might, in fact, have gone to drama school but for his family, which had a long tradition of working in the City of London and who encouraged him to do the same. This was the go-go 1980s, when working in finance suddenly became exciting to young people and the London markets were undergoing their “Big Bang” of deregulation and expansion. Chenery doesn’t regret a moment of it. In fact, he says: “I was much better off than my poor friends who went to college.”

When Chenery got out of the City (he found himself on the losing side of market collapses one time too many for a man trying to raise a young family), he applied much the same anti-elitist mindset to his new career in children’s theatre. In his view, Shakespeare had been the property of toffs and snobs for far too long, and needed to be demystified and made more fun for a much broader audience.

“We understand Shakespeare as part of our cultural heritage,” he said. “But if you went out into the High Street, 95 per cent of people couldn’t tell you the plot of Macbeth. If people have been exposed to Shakespeare, their memory is either of being bored, or being unable to get into it. They either don’t know his work or can’t enjoy it.”

Chenery’s first effort was a rewrite of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he helped stage at his children’s primary school in Woldingham, not far from his home in Oxted, in 1996. That was strictly an amateur effort, but quickly turned into something more when parents at other schools asked if they could use his script for productions of their own.

He and Matt Gimblett, who writes the music, went on to do versions of Macbeth, Hamlet, The Tempest, Twelfth Night as well as Romeo and Juliet. For the most part they have flown under the radar of the national media in Britain, in part because they have focused on schools and productions in smaller cities well away from London, and in part because they don’t tend to perform for more than a few days in any given venue.

Their working year, in fact, is largely dictated by the school calendar. They go on the road in September and stay there all the way to the spring holidays in April. They put on 10 shows a week, all but two of them during the school day. They have certainly managed to capture the school-age audience, typically playing theatres in the 700 to 1,500-seat range. The road crew is made up of about 15 performers, two live musicians who play along to pre-recorded tracks and three roadies.

Chenery may love the theatre, but the language he uses to talk about his work is still peppered with the jargon of marketing and business – as he says, the term “show business” is made up of two words, and one of those words is “business”. He talks about creating a “more user-friendly interface” and finding a “broader access point”. As far as he is concerned, his commercial success is justification enough for what he has done.

“I’m pretty pleased that we have refined some techniques that keep people hooked,” he says. “Hooked enough so we can get through an hour each act and people are still with us.”

He is also very relaxed about any criticism that might come his way: “We’re not trying to say we are better than the original or the real thing. We are saying that we can show a different way to access it, holding the attention of a larger number of people for much, much longer.”

Chenery is far from the first person to try to popularise Shakespeare, of course. Charles and Mary Lamb did it in the early 19th century with their short-story style Tales from Shakespeare, which are now a little too archaic to be useful in schools. Hollywood has also done its part. Romeo and Juliet alone has inspired such direct adaptations as Franco Zeffirelli’s popular 1960s version or Baz Luhrmann’s rock ’n’ roll gaudy-fest with Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes, not to mention indirect homages such as the musical West Side Story.

Not all Shakespeare scholars think this is necessarily a bad thing. Many will point to the fact that there isn’t much difference between rewriting Shakespeare for a particular audience and the endless scholarship produced to interpret his plays. They are all, in the end, interpretations. And what better way to pay homage to an author?

Chenery is perhaps least persuasive when he tries to argue that Shakespeare is unpopular or inaccessible, given the sheer multiplicity of productions and adaptations on offer on stage, screen and television. He has more of a point when it comes to the way Shakespeare has traditionally been taught in schools, although even that is now changing, as he acknowledges. “Some schools are now much more geared up to it, using better techniques for enjoying and teaching Shakespeare, which was not the case 10 or 15 years ago.”

He would argue, of course, that Shakespeare 4 Kidz has played a role in that improvement process, at least in Britain. He certainly believes that his four children – aged 11 to 21 – have benefited from his approach. “They’ve grown up thinking how enjoyable it is,” he said. “At the same time, they have benefited from a typical state education. They have not been to private school, so their English teaching hasn’t been forced down them so much.”

Again, it’s hard not to hear in Chenery’s words the anti-elitist sentiments of the Thatcher era of his youth. And, arguably, his Shakespeare adaptations betray a similar sort of quiet rage against the very notion of high culture: reading the script for Romeo and Juliet, it is difficult to tell sometimes if Chenery is venerating Shakespeare or taking perverse pleasure in ripping him to shreds.

Chenery says he appreciates Shakespeare’s insights into human nature and behaviour. But he also makes no apologies for infusing the music with the same upbeat ethic of Disney animated films. In the end, for him, it is about grabbing the audience’s attention and not letting go, which means focusing on the dramatic plotlines and ditching a lot of the poetic subtleties. “It’s good to see young people rapt in an exciting story,” he said. “That’s what I enjoy most about it.”

S4K’s Romeo and Juliet: The Musical plays at DUCTAC from today till Thursday. School bookings line: 055 3847 484. Box office: 04 341 4777. The show moves to Sharjah’s Cultural Palace on May 9 and 10.

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