Romeo and Juliet as Film Noir

When I read that Kenneth Branagh was going to set his Garrick Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet in the world of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and film noir, I feared the worst. To be sure, he has employed similar devices before—Love’s Labour’s Lost as a Hollywood musical, Twelfth Night in a wintry Victorian garden, even As You Like It in nineteenth-century Japan. But for me there is always the problem that a sixteenth-century play invariably evokes the time it was created. Where are the rapiers they talk about? Somehow in “modern” productions a knife or an edged weapon of some kind gets produced but it remains awkward. Worse still, almost invariably the modern setting contradicts the assumptions that shape the characters as written. Shakespearean productions don’t have to be Elizabethan romps, but the “pastness of a work”, to borrow a phrase from Lionel Trilling, needs to be embodied in the production.

The defence against this sort of criticism is the old one of relevance: the events of the play have to be associated with something happening now! Branagh, however, is much subtler than that. As he says in an eloquent introduction to the broadcast, the production is using the 1950s setting and the evocation of the style of film noir to heighten the emotional intensity of the original. So there are hints of the mafia in Michael Rouse’s imposing Capulet, with short black coffees regularly handed to him by an attendant and dark glasses. When he rebukes Tybalt and threatens Juliet he is as terrifying as any Mafia don. Missing, however, is the original character’s alternation between the comic and the dangerous. Branagh has cut the darkly comic passages from the opening brawl where Capulet calls for his broadsword and is held back by his wife. The costumes are pure 1950s; narrow pants and thin tie for Romeo, slacks and bare-midriff top for Juliet’s first appearance.

Still, the production tries to do justice to Shakespeare’s subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle blend of comedy and tragedy. Mercutio, played as a much older bon vivant than usual by Derek Jacobi, is indeed a lot of fun whether he is swanning around in a white dinner jacket and cane or singing the bawdy exchanges with the Nurse as a duet. The inspiration for Jacobi’s interpretation, Branagh tells us in his introduction, was Oscar Wilde in his last years in Paris. However, in spite of the twentieth-century costumes and this sort of allusion, the challenge and duel with Tybalt is played Elizabethan, at least internally. There is the dialogue registering Mercutio’s contempt for the new style of fencing adopted by Tybalt and it is clear the old bravo is itching to teach the obnoxious Capulet a lesson. As in the original, Romeo’s intervention is “all for the best”. He has just married Juliet. When Mercutio steps in to fight his new cousin on Romeo’s behalf it is appalling. All of which is established by Branagh. It becomes even more dangerous if Tybalt’s new fencing moves are being countered by Mercutio. His reproach—“I was hurt under your arm”—implies Romeo knocked up a deadly attack by Mercutio. This is not fully realised. Unfortunately, out of concern for Jacobi’s age—the great actor is seventy-seven—Branagh has included only the briefest of interactions in the actual duel. Still, Jacobi provides a magnificent death scene that once again is true to the play’s Elizabethan origins and much the better for it.

For all the modern trappings, the love story has an intensity that is both truthful and very moving. It begins at the ball, which includes a torch song, with a witty exchange of compliments that for all the richness of the imagery and the elaborate conceits become increasingly emotional when we come to the balcony scene. Lily James’s Juliet may be accomplished at the stately game of love but she gets a very human attack of hiccups and irreverently waves a bottle of champagne as she makes her first responses to Richard Madden’s Romeo. Between them they make the always difficult love-at-first-sight convention believable. My one criticism of the staging is that the balcony is too low. Romeo’s dialogue requires him to look up to Juliet, who on the Elizabethan stage would probably have been just under a canopy ornamented with representations of the planets, much of which is in the verse.

Usually the lovers’ emotional outbursts when everything goes wrong tend to be underplayed. Here the excesses seem believable. The Nurse’s upbraiding of the hysterical Romeo when he learns he has been banished is at once moving and comic. A modern audience does not need to know that “stand” is Elizabethan English for an erection to appreciate lines such as “Stand and ye be a man” as spoken by the splendid Meera Syal playing the Nurse; and the scene works much as it would have on the Elizabethan stage, only Branagh and his co-director Rob Ashford do not follow the original direction that has the Nurse snatch away Romeo’s dagger.

Equally authentically, the play’s contrast between love as sex, and love as redemption, emerges clearly in this production, with the bawdy lines delivered with relish and the love scenes moving from the passion and humour of the balcony scene to a sincerity that justifies the Friar’s belief that their union might reconcile the feud between their families. Branagh has always been very good at evoking simple unaffected verse-speaking from his actors. Here the thoughts behind the lines emerge with clarity and truth—never better than in Juliet’s potion speech staged by Branagh and Ashford with her standing alone, a slim figure against a white curtain surrounded by shadows that reinforce the gruesome images of graves and madness in the verse. As the potion takes effect she falls between the curtains. In a coup de théâtre the hangings fall on her like a shroud and the lights come up and we are in Juliet’s bedroom the following morning.

Branagh does not cut the mourning scene that follows the discovery of the supposedly dead Juliet. Certainly it is wildly over the top and Shakespeare may have been burlesquing the family’s earlier harshness when she resists marrying Paris. But to play the scene that way is a risk, especially for modern audiences. Instead Branagh begins with the lamentations then blends the cries with Patrick Doyle’s score and follows with the Friar’s rebuke that segues into a very moving funeral procession.

The play’s final movement towards the tragic resolution is drastically abridged. On the whole this is welcome, but I missed Romeo’s exchanges with the apothecary who sells him the poison. When well played, as in the 1936 film version by Leslie Howard, they reveal a new maturity in the character and a terrible despair. The double suicide at the end benefits from the cutting. The viewer knows how it must end and is free to concentrate on the sterile consummation in death and the two families’ anguish.

As with nearly all Branagh’s Shakespearean productions I have seen on film, and now broadcast, the performances are uniformly excellent. The colour-blind casting, with Ansu Kabia making a suitably menacing Tybalt, works well. Lily James is a radiant but very human Juliet. Richard Madden playing Romeo had some of his movement abridged in what was a virile and athletic performance, so he could go on for the live broadcast. I did not notice any handicap. Derek Jacobi demonstrated that Mercutio can be played older very successfully and this can be an enrichment of the text. Perhaps in the future the fight choreographer could come up with a not-too-exacting but seemingly deadly parry and riposte to bring about Romeo’s intervention.

Finally, what about the evocation of La Dolce Vita and film noir to intensify the emotion for a modern audience? Branagh even broadcast the production in black-and-white to enhance the analogy. For me they could have done without La Dolce Vita; but film noir does have possibilities. It has been done before on film. There were Laurence Olivier’s shadows, high-contrast photography and deep focus in his Hamlet (1948). And early in the twentieth century Max Reinhardt employed expressionist lighting for a stage Hamlet. Of course most directors imagine sunlight when thinking of Romeo and Juliet. But Juliet’s charnel-house imaginings are very black, and seeing Verona as a city shadowed by the feud between the families is perfectly valid, and heat, an integral part of the final duels in the play, has featured in many film noirs, most notably in Out of the Past (1947). What is more, film noir is not just trenchcoats and fedoras. It is menace, shadows and ambiguity, all more than compatible with settings and costumes that evoke the Elizabethan world. We await further developments.