In terms of sheer audacious ickiness, Steve Hili’s Romeo and Juliet 2 and a Zombie delivered. Testing the limits of audience stamina, the humour was decidedly sophomoric – with that in mind, it succeeded in dishing out an onslaught of pervy jokes, bawdy wordplay and visual gags (men wearing their underpants over sheer tights) in riotous combinations.
Hili’s story thumbs its nose at taboos with particular delight
The performance settled somewhere between cringeworthy and absurd, a difficult road to travel, but there was undeniable fun to be had.
The sword fight between zombie Tybalt (Joe Depasquale) and Romeo (Joseph Zammit) was one great sequence, dangerously uncapped blades and all, as was the Facebook conversation between Juliet (Chantelle Micallef Grimaud) and Paris (David Chircop), endless LVOLs (Laughing Verily Out Loud) notwithstanding.
Still, there’s only so many times a yelled expletive is funny, rather than tiresome. It sometimes felt as though somebody had crammed a thesaurus full of rude words into the script and hoped for the best. As a veteran of degenerate burlesque humour, I think a central nugget of wit has got to rope the whole performance together.
The conceit of this play, that the star-crossed lovers don’t take their own lives but go on to be married and try to make it in modern-day London, had potential. In some ways this was cleverly explored, with Romeo’s failed career as a musician and Juliet’s thwarted attempts at becoming a barrister.
They enjoy an active love life, but their emotional lives are fraught with recrimination and bitterness – at this point, Paris reappears and tries to win back Juliet.
His secret weapon is Tybalt, who’s been brought back from the dead and is twice as angry with Romeo for having married his cousin. Meanwhile, Romeo is reunited with his old flame Rosaline (Alba Florian Viton), and adulterous complications ensue.
There’s Prince Escalus (Aleksandra Radulovic) to introduce the action, and the three Weird Sisters from Macbeth make a surreal appearance (played by Sean Briffa, complete with hand puppets) to declaim the couple’s behaviour, talk about incest, and obsess over their non-existent sex appeal.
As you may have gathered, the play was all grotesques and gags – a combination of off-colour humour and sick jokes. Hili’s story thumbs its nose at taboos with particular delight. The overall impression was of a script written by a schoolboy who’d been forced to study Shakespeare and is now relishing the opportunity to get his own back.
The play probed every raunchy association, a gamut of scatological send-ups and foulness – Aristophanes would have been proud.
Of course, in today’s world, dirty jokes aren’t the least bit subversive and the potential for statement-making is limited. If this was a celebration of vulgarity, it did so under the aegis of obscenity already run amok in contemporary culture.
More practically, the production would have benefited from being cut, compressing the funnier scenes and quickening the overall pace.
The play was silly, and (because that’s what it set out to be) successful.
The audience were lapping it up (a metaphor Hili would approve of), and that’s one kind of arbiter, arguably the most important of all, since they’re the ones shelling out for a ticket.