Love, Loving, Beloved

Last night I went with a group of friends to see a production of Romeo and Juliet.  I've only actually seen the play once, at Shakespeare in the Park in Boston, so I was quite looking forward to it.

Alas!  The production was much hampered by the fact that almost no one on the stage could really...act.  It once seemed to me that most bad actors fall into one of two types:  yellers and whisperers. Yellers try to show you how intense their emotion is by yelling, while whisperers try to do the same by whispering. I've since seen many more actors, so I now realise that this division on my part is inaccurate, but I think there was

something to it for last night's production. The actors were almost all, not exactly yellers, but very, very hyperactive. They showed that they were experiencing emotion by becoming overexcited.  Very overexcited. Actually, now that I think of it, I should have seen the poster as an omen...

I can't say I got nothing out of the experience (and I wouldn't say that about any night at the theatre, anyway.  I always get something out of going to see a play), because the very fact that I found it bad forced me to think about what made it bad for me, which in turn forced me to think a little more deeply about the play, and about acting.  It seemed to me that a good deal of the problem last night (and the people in my group who didn't like it said the same) was that there was very little sense, at most points, of the people engaging with each other (this was especially true of the Romeo, whose performance suddenly made me understand what an "antic disposition" is, and how it can grate.  Or, as one of them put it, "he spent too much time cleaning his own wound."  A striking but perfectly apt description).  Perhaps the actors were inexperienced, but there was a sense that they were focusing most of their attention on their own performance, rather than on connecting with each other.  I was particularly sad about the Mercutio, because at first I thought he would be good, but then he substituted ranting for emotion.

It wasn't just that, though.  Maybe it sounds odd to say, but the Romeo and Juliet fell in love in what I felt was just a wrong way.  They captured the almost hysterical enthusiasm of love, the giggling and the adrenaline and the crazy excitement, but they didn't capture what I would call the sliding - the open-mouthed bit underneath.

Whenever I've fallen in love (that is to say, been at the beginning of love), or even been infatuated in more than a simple surface way, I have certainly felt foolish (and acted so!), and giggly, and filled with crazy excitement (although just writing that makes those things sound boring and controlled).  But I've also felt a kind of wonder, a sort of disbelief that a person like the one I fancy could exist.  There is a sense, for me, of marvelling at the simple fact that I have discovered such an other person.  Of course, I suppose under analysis this turns out to be wonder at the intensity of my emotions, but it doesn't feel like that:  it feels like a great rise in the chest at the sight of the other person, a catching of the breath and a clutching of the heart. Love is the giggle, but it's also the gasp:  the open-mouthed bit underneath.

There are without a doubt such moments in R&J.  When Romeo sees Juliet for the first time, and says, "O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!  It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night, like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear..." of course this is rhetoric, but it's also how it is to see the person you love - a moment of pause in the soul if not in the body or the life.  And the same when she is waiting for him on their wedding night and muses, "When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun."  Yes, this is a statement and a moment of great intensity, but it seems to me that part of that intensity is a sort of wonder that there could be such a person.  And such wonder is to me a quiet thing, inexpressible and disbelieving and thus soft-voiced.  But, although the Juliet was better, neither of the main characters captured that part of the experience of falling in, or newly being in, love.

Of course, as some of the people I was with pointed out, they're young, so they would be giggly and slightly hysterical.  But I got to thinking this morning, they're not really young.  Juliet's parents say a number of times that there are women her age in Verona who are married, even mothers; this would seem to suggest that 13 was a lot older than it is now.  Romeo's a bit of a fool, one could argue, and there's no reason to suppose that this love will be for him any more intense than his love for Rosaline.  But his love for Rosaline is pretty deep, and pretty dreamy, so I think you could also make the argument that he, too, can feel profoundly.

I am a bone-deep die hard romantic, and have been one all my life, for better and for worse. This means, of course, that I believe in the magic of love, and it also means that I strew my loving and my beloved with sparkly dust. So perhaps I am wrong; perhaps love really is just giggling and frantic behaviour and foolishness. But I think part of the greatness of reading or seeing Romeo and Juliet lies in the watching of two people discovering the marvel of love, and in watching their revelling in the pleasure of simultaneously disbelieving and believing (and because of that disbelief finding greater delight in their belief) that they have found an other that gives them such pleasure, in all valances of that word.  And I didn't see that last night.

I couldn't find a clip of a good performance, so here is a clip that includes a tiny snippet of a performance, although you have to fast forward.