Acting:
Even though the actors spoke in Arabic, I found that it was
surprisingly easy to interpret the message they attempted to convey. I noticed
that the acting was even more bold and melodramatic than that of what I have
seen on Broadway and here in London. From reading different reviews, I gathered
that the play was stylized in a similar fashion to Arab television’s soap
operas. Ahmed Moneka played the lead role of Romeo in a way that conformed to
both my idea of soap operas as well as the overemotional, dramatic, and
sorrowful Romeo as Shakespeare depicts him. While I felt that the constant melodrama sometimes made the play difficult to endure, it might be that Romeo and Juliet is melodramatic in any form. I have never before seen the original Romeo and Juliet as it is performed, so
I cannot compare the two. The drama was thankfully occasionally broken by the
appearance of Mercutio, played by Fikrat Salim. His interactions with a young
Benvolio provided much-needed comic relief. The other important comic relief,
the nurse, was equally well done. The actress who played the nurse successfully
conveyed the crass and jovial yet warmhearted nature of Juliet’s nurse. Sarwa
Malik plays Juliet. Juliet’s performance was, like Romeo’s, performed with emotional intensity. Juliet’s role in the play was rather small; her time on stage
was shorter than that of her father, Capulet, and Romeo’s father, Montague. In
my opinion, the actors in the roles of Capulet, Montague, and Lady Montague
exhibited the most impressive acting. The feuding between Capulet and Montague’s felt highly charged and complex. The tension between the actors
was palpable. Lady Montague was convincingly tenacious and brave when she
confronted her brother-in-law Capulet about the truth behind the feud.
Capulet’s subsequent emotional breakdown and confession to Lady Montague was a touching and triumphant performance.
Venue, staging,
lighting, props, wardrobe:
Though Riverside Studios was a very modern, stylish
establishment, it was the atmosphere that detracted most from my experience. This
was simply because the room in which the play took place was so warm and
stifling that it made me feel ill and distracted me from the events on stage.
Despite this minor inconvenience, I was impressed with the staging and lighting
of this performance. The stage was set up in a thoroughly modern, minimalistic
style. Few props cluttered the stage. To change from scene to scene, several
boxes and large shapes were moved around the stage. The minimalistic style of
the play forced me to focus on those props that were most important to establishing the mood
of the play, which were the guns that various actors held. The simple black
guns, along with deafening gunfire sound effects at frequent intervals throughout the play,
set the tone of the performance as serious and dark. The lighting of the play
exacerbated the dark tone. There was very little lighting on the stage;
usually, only a focused white light illuminated the speaking actor(s). Like the
set, the lighting was stark. Even when colored light was used, it was often
blue to convey the somber mood. The wardrobe of the actors was appropriate for
modern-day Iraq. The young men were dressed casually and the old men were
dressed in business suits. Juliet wore modern casual clothing except in
the scene in which she reunites with Romeo, in which she is wearing a
formal and traditional outfit for her father’s party. In my opinion, the casual,
everyday outfits worn by the actors detracted from the dramatic, tragic, and
epic nature of the play. I felt that a more minimalistic wardrobe would have
better complemented such a minimalistic style of set, staging, and lighting.
Changes from the
original:
Romeo and Juliet in
Baghdad is in many ways an entirely different production than Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. This adaptation moves
the play from Italy in the High Middle Ages/Early Renaissance to modern
postwar Iraq. The numerous subsequent changes in set, wardrobe, and props that
result from this movement in time and space are too many to enumerate. The most
significant and exhaustive change is the complete reworking of the script, the
exclusion of a major character, Friar Laurence, and the revision of the classic
tragic ending. It is hard to know exactly how the dialogue proceeded since I
cannot understand Arabic, but the English translations indicated a colloquial
style of speech and banter. The structure of the script was also changed in
several ways. Lady Montague was given a greater speaking role. Whereas in the
original, Capulet and Montague only speak to one another after the deaths of their
children, in the adaptation, the two men exchange dialogue at length on several occasions. A manufactured
character, the Teacher, was given a small speaking role in which he seemed to
be the voice of reason. Presumably, the Teacher was created to replace the need for Friar Laurence. As such, the Teacher is a character who is
sympathetic to the plight of the lovers and has a close relationship with
Romeo. However, his role is much smaller than that of Friar Laurence. A
Christian priest fulfills the second purpose of Friar Laurence, which is to
protect Romeo and Juliet. I think this change resulted simply because the writers decided a
Christian church was the best place to hide a Muslim. The change of the ending
gave me mixed feelings. Instead of killing themselves because of a tragic misunderstanding, Romeo and Juliet have one last moment together in the church before Paris bombs it. I felt
that this final change was so critical that the play loses the element
that makes Romeo and Juliet the
unique tragedy that it is. The outcome in the original is as heart wrenching as
it is because of the tragic misunderstanding of the lovers (I always think –
“If he had just waited!”). The sadness of the situation is compounded by the pitiful nature of
Paris as he requests to lay beside a fiancée who never loved him. The Baghdad adaptation of the original ending loses
these elements, and as such did not produce in me quite the same feeling of
gut-wrenching anguish. On the other hand, the change in ending allows this play to better relate to actual tragic events that have occurred and continue to occur in Iraq. Overall, it is a valuable alteration because it tells the story of violence specific to Iraqi history.
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