Keziah Cho
This Western-themed staging of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays offers a fresh and endearing spin, but falls short in terms of emotional impact.
The day after my finals, I threw out my notes with a vengeance and began curating my post-exam schedule.
Celebration dinners, a trip to Edinburgh, farewell parties— my calendar was packed. First up on my list was cowboy Shakespeare.
Being an English undergrad and therefore chronically uncool, I’d bought my standing ticket within three minutes of seeing the Globe Theatre’s ad for their Wild West-themed production of Romeo and Juliet.
Poking my head into my flatmate’s room, I enthusiastically delineated my plan to celebrate never having to study early modern theatre again with… more early modern theatre, and all I received was, ‘You are such a nerd.’
I ignored her. The point of being a student in London was seeing Romeo with a cowboy hat and a thick Southern drawl.
Beyoncé and balcony scenes
As it turned out, there were to be no Southern drawls that day. That was fine, because in a way, this refusal to take the setting too seriously felt like part of the point.
The cognitive dissonance of seeing a showdown performed in various English accents was a reminder of just how sweeping and universal the experience of thwarted love and unnecessary violence can be—it is a story that would be at home anywhere.
“The result is a production that is widely accessible and light-hearted”
Indeed, this production draws deeply from 2020s pop culture: the Globe website cites the recent success of Beyoncé’s album Cowboy Carter and its reignition of public fascination with Black cowboy culture as one of the main inspirations for the performance.
In other words, Holmes’ Romeo and Juliet yokes together the Western frontier, contemporary culture and politics, and medieval Italy.
The result is a production that is widely accessible and light-hearted.
Holmes clearly understands that parts of the play are meant to be funny, and he sustains the festive mood to wonderful effect throughout the first half—when Romeo and his disguised friends burst into Lord Capulet’s stuffy hoedown performing an unapologetically corny dance routine, they create a moment that deserves replication in all future Romeo and Juliet productions.
Lola Shalam is an endearingly earthy Juliet: arriving clumsily to the stage on a wooden float during the balcony scene (she has to tell a staff member to move her closer to Romeo), she combines the genuine wonder and joy of first love with a healthy dose of teenage awkwardness.
The disjunction between Juliet’s fumbling naivety and her eventual determination to die promises to establish the play as a comedy gone very wrong: the production forcibly wrenches her into a tragedy where she doesn’t belong.
A tragedy… or not quite?
But therein lies the issue: to what extent, really, does Holmes manage to honour the ‘tragedy’ part of the play?
As enjoyable as the comedy is, it seems almost to outstay its welcome.
Michael Elcock excels as the swaggering Mercutio, but he keeps performing physical comedy and lopsided grinning even after a fatal wound, making the audience laugh uncertainly until he closes his eyes.
Towards the end, Holmes’ theatrical decision to have the seemingly dead Juliet reappear as a ghost and dance with Romeo in the Capulet tomb renders the scene gently whimsical rather than heartbreaking.
“Romeo and Juliet was thoroughly good fun”
Somehow, sad harmonica music doesn’t quite depict the devastation of young love marred by generational hatred.
Holmes rushes the ending, cutting a substantial chunk of Shakespeare’s dialogue from the last scene—presumably due to time constraints—as though he doesn’t want to linger too long on the tragedy.
This seems to be part of the Globe’s penchant for lightness.
Overall Thoughts
Throughout the years, they’ve displayed a consistent tendency to keep things fun, as though to assure the audience that nothing is ever really that tragic.
I was there for their 2022 production of King Lear, arguably Shakespeare’s most devastating tragic play, and the ‘dead march’ that marked the end of the play slowly picked up tempo, eventually becoming a full-on jig for the audience to participate in.
Similarly, in their 2015 production of Richard II, the heaviness of the titular character’s abdication scene evaporates when he sits down, pouts at a member of the audience, and reaches out to hold their hand for comfort.
The focus on laughs makes for undeniably crowd-pleasing performances, but the company also risks numbing their audience to the potential of tragedy— its potential, namely, to shock and disturb.
None of this, of course, detracts from the fact that cowboy Romeo and Juliet was thoroughly good fun.
Did it pack the punch I expected? Admittedly not.
Was it still fresh, unique, and most importantly, an excellent salve for my exam-addled brain? Absolutely. Sometimes all one needs is a saloon brawl or two in one’s Shakespeare, and in such cases Holmes’ production does just the trick.
READ NEXT:
- ADOLESCENCE: A CRITICAL VIEW OF MODERN-DAY SOCIETY
- SUNRISE ON THE REAPING REVIEW
- HAIM – ‘RELATIONSHIPS’ REVIEW
Featured image courtesy of Kyle Head on Unsplash. Image license can be found here. No changes have been made to this image.
Keziah Cho
Keziah Cho is an English undergraduate, born and raised in Hong Kong but currently studying in London. Aside from writing for Empoword, she also writes for two student publications, Pi Media and the Cheese Grater.