Shakespeare Untold: Romeo and Juliet (The Party Planner’s Tale)

Another year, another shoddy Shakespeare adaptation. Except this time it’s from people who should know better: Shakespeare’s Globe, the Bard’s home in London. Surrounded by the pink detritus of a party balloons, petals and decorative bay trees, the party planner of the Capulet ball (Sally Lofthouse) tells the audience the story of Romeo and Juliet. 

A few quotations from the play are used, but otherwise the plot is explained in a clear, child-friendly way by the graceful and expressive Lofthouse. Towards the beginning, the party planner gets a little input from the children in the audience. When she asks them to give examples of really important jobs, one kid says “doctor”, one says “mayor”, another says “pooing in the streets”. Lofthouse duly ignores it. The interactive element is quickly abandoned anyway. 

It’s a decent and digestible précis of the play, but it’s marred by an embarrassing attempt to throw a load of contemporary elements at it, like Twitter and hashtags, Katy Perry and the Kardashians. Sure, it’s aimed at kids, but there’s a difference between accessibility and vapidity. This is vapid.

The party planner is a fairy godmother with a feather duster, image-obsessed and bringing a bizarre consumerist bent to the play. Stripped of any sort of message, except that throwing lavish parties is a good thing, Romeo and Juliet becomes a strangely empty affair.