Romeo and Juliet - performed by the Crossdressing Pubescent Players

14.01.2009 um 12:01

Franco Zefirelli, Baz Luhrman, John Madden, Andrzej Bartkowiak. What do these four all have in common? Yes, you guessed right: all have in some way or another put Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to film. Oh, and as of today, they’re all out of a job, too. Yes, Hollywood’s greats have all been made completely redundant by a group of pubescent teenagers who got together and discovered their cinematographic talents in the basement of a house somewhere in Basel, back in 1999...

Ok, that might require further explanation. Romeo and Juliet has been a staple in the high school classroom for as long as anyone can remember. And it was no different at my school, where we read the play at the age of 15 or so. At the end of it all we were all put into groups, had a camera thrust into our hands, and were given the task, of putting any one of the five acts of the play to screen. Now this was a heck of a lot of fun, and we decided to give our interpretation an unusual twist, or two. So, we decided to

1. cross-dress (well, almost everyone did, except for a certain someone who wishes to remain anonymous)
2. set the whole thing in the 70s (as you can tell, our historical research and costumes, however, were not all that accurate).
3. turn tragedy into comedy (although I’m not sure whether that was actually on purpose or not - I suspect the latter).

With these explanatory notes out of the way, all that remains for me is to