Seeing Romeo and Juliet in The Globe

Yesterday my dad and I went in to London to see Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theatre. 

We came in via train to Fenchurch street and then took a boat to The Globe. We were up in a gentlemen's box, not as high up as the Gods but not on the same level as the stage or the groundlings. The box was decorated with images titled with the four humours: melancholy, sanguine,  choleric and phlegmatic which refer to four fluids that are in the body.

The play began shortly after we arrived, the cast came out on stage dressed in modern clothes - which I was not expecting - then introduced themselves and who they were playing. Their speech was still Shakespearean, only broken when a character would give a fact linked to the play such as: "patriarchy is a system that benefits the men in power" and "suicide is the leading cause of death for people under thirty five."

The best part of the production was how they humanized some characters and how the subtly villanized others in a very clever way. For instance, I had not connected with Romeo or Juliet when reading the play and found it slightly laborious to analyse but seeing the actors on stage changed how I saw them. Count Paris was also a character that was brought to life in a very brilliant way; he seemed far more pushy and possessive of Juliet than he did in the script.

The other part that I could not experience was the music. There was a band that mainly stayed in the balconies above the stage, but their music was what made many of the fight scenes so intense and brilliantly summed up the feelings at the end of the play with their ending song.

I enjoyed the production very much and it's impact on me was greater than I had expected.

Some other points of the play that I really enjoyed :

- The use of bikes for Mercutio, Benvolio and Romeo 

- The delivery of Lord Capulet's response to Juliet refusing to marry Paris

- Making Tybalt and the other young men appearing to be in a gang, ones you'd find in town

- The  teenage - whiney tone of Juliet with the lines "where for art thou Romeo" 

- Romeo being much more comedic than I expected

- The Capulet ball and the choice of costume and the music they chose