Romeo and Juliet

In this production, I chose to multiply the protagonists (4 couples) in order to emphasize Romeo and Juliet’s characters as essences rather than as psychological entities. For the lovers, physical separation is not a reality of time and distance. Thought unites them at the same instant.

All the other characters need to go, to arrive at their destination, while the lovers live in a reality that leaps over the time and distance that exist between the will, the thought and the consummation.

Doubling the lovers enabled realizing that experience. Juliet 1 comes out to the balcony, Juliet 2 is already talking with Romeo 2. Juliet 3 is waiting for the nurse to return, etc. The auditorium’s floor is shared between the audience and the actors. The spectators sit in a right angle, watching the nurse cover the whole track around them until she reaches Juliet… Simultaneousness and multi directions enable us to enter the lover’s whirlpool…

Each couple of lovers bring a different aspect of their encounters, and frees the audience from trying to identify with the actor as a representative of character. We don’t need to verify for ourselves which Romeo or Juliet are the character, the true answer to the reliability of love. On one side of the audience is a small theatre stage, on which Juliet 4 (a male actor) will sit, masked, to remind us that long ago theatre had “a stage”, another element of the performance’s space and time…

The essence of the experience is in the composition of space and time, which are isolated from the experience of our daily existence.

By William Shakespeare.

Translated by Rephael Eliaz.

Adapted and directed by Rina Yerushalmi.

Set and space design: Moshe Sternfeld.

Costumes: Rakefet Levi.

Lighting: Avi yona Bueno (Bambi).

Musical director and arranger: Israel Bright.

Masks: Nelly Omer.

Props: Shalom Stuckhammer.

Movement coach: Marina Beltov.

Speech coach: Noga Yetomi.

Cast (in alphabetical order): Lior Ben Avraham, Noam Ben Azar, David Bentovich, Pnina Bart, Gil Chernovich, Boaz Cohen, Itzhak Cohen, David Koren, Moshe Malka, Amichay Pardo, Iyar Wolpe, Neta Yeszin, Gadi Zdaka, Osnat Zibil.