Tweeting Shakespeare

As one who has difficulty in telling a tweet from a twitter or a blog, it took me a while to get my head around this one. So it was onto the Internet to find what it's all about. The first thing I came across was the actress playing Juliet - Twitter name julietcap16 - giving us a tour of her bedroom on YouTube. She shows us a photo of her mother - killed in a car accident by Daddy Montagu, I later learned, hence the Montagu/Capulet antipathy in this particular scenario.

The title of this new version of "Romeo and Juliet" is the punning "Such Tweet Sorrow" - ouch. So the next step was to go on to the suchtweetsorrow.com Web site and find out where they were in the story. When I logged on shortly after the project was launched, there'd been a lot of twittering about a punch up in a pub car park between Juliet's brother Tybalt and Romeo.

Meanwhile, Juliet was planning her 16th birthday party, where she and the boy wonder are presumably fated to get it together. She's two years older than Shakespeare's Juliet, I notice, presumably to make love legal in the 21st century.

Just not the real thing

Meanwhile, Mercutio - or Merc, as he's sometimes known - appeared to be trying to get it on via text with Juliet's older sister Jess, nickname Nurse (get it?).

He said: "i saw the way your face lit up when you recieved (sic) when you received my tweet of looking lovely at the pub - i like to spread a little happiness." Didn't work though. She came back with heavy irony: "Just like u want 2make my brother happy? Smooth. First mock my age, then my family. I can hardly resist you."

I hate to criticize, but the action seems a bit on the slow side compared to Shakespeare's original. But then, so is the site - obviously very popular- with loads of visitors. And by the time you get to it, the story will hopefully have moved on to something more dramatic.

A play for any time

I doubt, though, that the Bard will be much bothered by this latest move. "Romeo and Juliet" in particular has always provided rich pickings for producers with bright ideas. It's a tale which adapts to any time, any age, any race. A recent production of the play in Bristol was set in an old people's home with the hero and heroine in their 80s.

I remember a youth theater version also set in modern London in which the Montagus and Capulets were two feuding gangs, one white, one black. On a similar theme, the story was of course the basis for the now classic musical "West Side Story." I've seen a 1960s hippy version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a musical based on "Othello" and way back in the 1950s, there was of course the film "Forbidden Planet," which relocated "The Tempest" to outer space with Ariel played by a robot. There's a remake of that in the pipeline, by the way.

So what can we do next to the Bard, I wonder, to give him contemporary relevance? What about a version of "King Lear," where the hero is a teenager addicted to rave parties and illegal drugs - which is why he goes mad. The two wicked daughters could be his cruel aunties, Cordelia his estranged mum and the blinding of Gloucester a knife crime committed by Regan's toy boy partner.

Or what about a video game of "Richard III"? If you rescue the princes in the tower, or get Richard that horse he's bellowing for, you can alter the course of English history.

And then there's my text version of "Hamlet." To be or not to be: 2 B OR NT 2 B. See, it rhymes. It's poetry, isn't it?

Author: Carol Allen
Editor: Sabina Casagrande