Micro review 13

 

Fair Roasline by Natasha Solomons (Bonnier Books)

Being someone who has studied Shakespeare's plays in quite some detail I wasn't entirely sure about a speculative fiction based on Romeo and Juliet but it has to be said that the tagline:

Was the greatest ever love story a lie?

As someone who has always found Romeo and Juliet to be a bit creepy rather than a romantic tale I was interested enough to request a copy from NetGalley and I am pleased to say that I did enjoy the book.

Many people forget that at the very beginning of the play Romeo is smitten by Rosaline, not Juliet, and it is this romance that Solomons explores as it was just as 'forbidden' as the central one for Rosaline is Juliet's cousin and thus from the 'enemy' Capulet family.

The story stays faithful to the Shakespeare play (which he in turn had borrowed from someone else) for the large part , with the first half being about Rosaline's time with Romeo and then what happens as this relationship wanes and she is replaced by Juliet. The big twist however is that rather than having Romeo roughly the same age as Juliet here he is much older and very much a predator (which fits with my idea of the play's plot being creepy). His romantic words and wooing become incredibly uncomfortable reading as you hear him say them to multiple women/girls.

The parts where the novel  branches furthest away from the play were slightly less credible for me - although perfectly within keeping for the period in which the play is set - but overall I really liked this 'what if' version of the story.

Adaptations and different versions of the same tale

Matthew Bourne's Romeo+Juliet

It has been a while since I've posted about the theatre on the blog, I haven't given up going but I am going a lot less - I find the days in London (or late nights in Norwich) incredibly tiring since the brain haemorrhage and so I am being a lot more discerning!

Past reviews on here show how many versions of Romeo and Juliet I've seen and also how much I enjoy Matthew Bourne's ballets.

Initially I thought that this might be the ballet that destroyed my love of Bourne's work and had the potential be worse than the dire 2017 Romeo and Juliet.

This is a very liberal retelling of the story and at first I really couldn't handle the changes in the plot - I couldn't see where the original story was. I couldn't work out who was representing the Montague family and who were supposed to be the Capulets. In fact the only characters I could name were Romeo and Juliet!

I'm not going to talk about how the plot works as I don't want to spoil this for people still to see the performance but I will say that you should stick with it - by the end of the ballet all of the threads are pulled together and all of the story telling choices do make sense.  This is definitely Matthew Bourne's Romeo+Juliet and emphatically not Shakespeare's! However as Shakespeare already "repurposed" an earlier version to create his play I'm not that fussed about the story changes as ultimately they do all work.

The choreography, energy and in fact the whole performance by the dancers was wonderful - my main issue with this was the liberties taken with Prokofiev's score. This is so clever in the original but here was chopped about and reordered so much that it didn't seem to actually be helping tell the story - it could have been any music that the dancers were using. The original builds the tension, shows the romance and then the tragedy - here it is just noise and doesn't move the plot along.

I am pleased that I saw this, overall I enjoyed it, and it was so much better than the 2017 version but mum will be pleased when I say that so far no version of Romeo and Juliet I've seen comes close to being as good as the Kenneth Macmillan version of the ballet and I'd see that again at the drop of a hat!

Talking Books: The Children of Jocasta

The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes.

I think my love of Greece and all things Greek shines through on this blog, from reworkings of the myths and legends through to seeing plays from millennia ago in the original language! I've been looking forward to this book since last November when Natalie Haynes spoke about it at the Heffer's Classics Forum.

This is Haynes' reworking of the stories behind the plays Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone but focuses her dual time line on two female characters who feature almost as throwaway lines.

At the very start I was a little unsure about the book, I couldn't place where the prologue fitted in to the tale at all and this confused me but once the story proper started with chapters alternating between generations I was hooked completely and stayed up far too late reading the book because I just couldn't put it down.

The characters were hugely realistic and vivid while the prose and descriptions really brought to life how the Hellenes lived. I've visited the ruins in Greece and know how the palaces work in theory but this book really made the stones I've visited into a living place

I knew the rough outlines of the stories behind the novel but Haynes used her knowledge of all versions of the stories to weave a brilliant tale that made me think about all the ideas I held about the characters and to think about the tales from a female point of view.

I think that this book would be just as enjoyable if you don't know much about the original stories/plays and that Haynes adds to them rather than anything else, I now want to search out Sophocles' other Oedipus play and also the mentions of him in Homer's Odyssey - oh and Anouilh's version of Antigone...