A Story of Greater Woe. Sean O’Connor’s and Tom Morris’s Juliet and Her Romeo (2010)

This contribution deals with Sean o’Connor’s and Tom Morris’s play Juliet and Her Romeo, first staged at Bristol’s Old Vic on 16 March 2010. The central question from which this drama stems is would happen if Romeo and Juliet were no longer in their teens but much older? Set in a future post-civil-war scenario, the action takes place in a nursing home where eighty-something Romeo and Juliet meet, fall in love, and eventually commit suicide while, on the background of a reversed generational conflict, the children wish to take control of their parents’ lives and riches through not-too-covert forms of violence. Although it maintains large portions of the Shakespearean text, this adaptation completely reconfigures its dramatic purpose by questioning the role of the elderly in contemporary society and also broadens its political scope by calling into cause the re-establishment of a shared national identity that could soothe and heal past civil wounds. Still, no reconciliation takes place in the end and Juliet and Her Romeo ultimately presents us a dismal finale where no one is “pardoned” (Romeo and Juliet, 5.3.308).