Young Hearts Run Free

I've long wanted to write about the play we saw last Monday (well, not that long but ever since I saw it). To give you a hint, this song was on the soundtrack for the movie Romeo + Juliet. You know, the one with Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio, in which Mercutio was black. It was directed by the very same Baz Luhrmann who directed the popular Moulin Rouge! a few years later (and is now working on The Great Gatsby, starring DiCaprio). Romeo + Juliet was received quite controversially as it put the whole thing in a contemporary context, and the two rival families acted as some gangs on the beach.

You know, I was the kind of teenager who loved Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and sonnets and compared them to her own love life on a regular basis. I can't help loving it, though I've only read Hungarian translations so far. You might recall that we started to visit the shootings of a Hungarian improvisational sitcom starring Rudolf Péter and Nagy-Kálózy Eszter, and I really got the hang of it. So I said, why not see them in a "real" play? So I bought the tickets for És Rómeó és Júlia (And Romeo and Juliet) as a Christmas present for my boyfriend.

You might have noticed that there's an extra "and" at the beginning, and you are right. This is not the usual form of the play. Based on the idea of Vámos Miklós, the whole thing had been rewritten for two actors, Rudolf and Nagy-Kálózy, directed by Horgas Ádám, who is a regular Shakespeare-director in Hungary as far as I know. (You see, it's a little bit funny that I haven't seen the real thing yet.) Thus, the two of them play all the characters in the play, from the lovers through Father Lawrence to Mercutio. You can imagine I'd loved the idea from the first time I heard of it, which must have been around ten years ago. I just checked and they presented it in 2000. They've played it all over the country, and received several awards for it, of which I don't want to write now. You can guess they've had their time to perfect it.
In this kind of acting it is extremely important to create an atmosphere, as the audience has to see all the others in the scene. Think of the beginning of the play, for example, when a fight evolves between the two families. You see only two people, but you have to see a whole group of fighters. What happens is, they act as if they saw the others. For example, both of them fight with an unseen duellist, which must be extremely difficult. In addition, they have to switch from one character to another. In one moment they impersonate a Capulet, in the next one a Montague. I guess you need an ability to change personality quickly, and of course you have to concentrate hard.

The whole thing looked very creative to me. They worked out a system of epithets for the important characters. For example, Benvolio wore glasses, so quite often one of them was holding the glasses and talking to them as if Benvolio was there. Juliet's nurse was symbolized by what I first thought to be a shawl but turned out to be a pair of French briefs. And of course gestures and intonation became important, too. There was no furniture, no rooms, no whatever, so they had to imitate those, too, just like in pantomime. In some scenes, they served as setting themselves, just like in the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, you know, when someone played the wall. But here it didn't seem artificial or ridiculous. There was a scene I particularly loved. You know, the balcony scene, when Juliet is talking to the moonlight. While Nagy-Kálózy was acting out the monologue, Rudolf formed a balcony of his body, which also signified Romeo's presence, so that the whole scene became very intimate.

Actually, the whole play seemed very intimate to me. I know it's lay thinking, but I can't help feeling that the fact they are married in real life helped a lot in creating this aura of harmony and love around them. And it must be such a big thing to create a whole world from your acting and your partner, your body and personality. There was a strong presence, a sense of concentration behind all the characters. I especially liked Mercutio's monologue about the Queen Mab, performed by Nagy-Kálózy. To tell the truth, she was much more impressive in it than in the sitcom, Mindenből egy van. This seemed more of her ground. Here she was playful, witty, charming, and so on. She really made me believe she was a teenage girl first time in love. And Rudolf was great as usual, with the opportunity to show his dramatic side, too.

We were lucky because we sat in the middle of the first row, and heard and saw everything (even those blocked out by my cough for the people behind me). It made a big impression on both of us. We loved what they did to the play, this new interpretation, the scenes they kept and left out, the music and the silence that went with the acting, even the lights. It had a cheerful atmosphere in general, but the end was cathartic. I highly recommend that you go and watch it.