Romeo and Juliet - November 2009
The Michael Hall Theatre School becomes the first Blackpool Theatre School to sign up to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Stand up for Shakespeare” campaign with its forthcoming performances of Romeo and Juliet on the 28th Feb and 1st March. Stand up for Shakespeare is an initiative by the RSC to promote awareness and understanding of the works of Shakespeare, making the Bard of Avon more accessible to children, adults, and the community at large.
The Michael Hall Theatre School presents Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with adults and children from the drama department in a contemporary setting of the Shakespeare tragedy. When love blossoms it recognises no social divide. However, gang culture, knife crime and binge drinking bring pressures to bear, which ultimately lead, to catastrophe.
Two households, both alike in dignity, or lack of it, hate each other with a passion so intense, that, for any excuse, street violence, fuelled by drugs and alcohol, breaks out. Unfortunately, the teenage children of the heads of these two feuding families hold no such grudge. Their love, which, in the end, leads to their suicides, finally concludes the long running vendetta of the two ‘families’.