Romeu e Julieta – Shakespeare para todos (Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare For All) (Cabral, 2015)

Romeu e Julieta – Shakespeare para todos (Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare For All)

This production of Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare For All (Romeu e Julieta – Shakespeare para todos) was performed at the Federal University of Santa Catarina Theater (Teatro da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina) in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil on November, 28th, 2015 by the Elefants Theatre Company (Elefants Companhia de Teatro).

About The Group

The Elefants Theatre Company, an artistic group born from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina), has been gathering momentum as a professional collective in the city of Florianópolis, state of Santa Catarina in Brazil. Among its members they have an experienced director as well as actors, dancers, language experts and a stage lighting professional.

The company came to life with a Shakespeare production (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and, three years later, gained a boost from another of Shakespeare’s plays (Romeo and Juliet), which shows the company’s creative connection with the works of the Bard of Avon and also conveys how much they feel driven towards his artistic production. Regarding the first play (in which many of today’s members participated, including the director), A Midsummer Night’s Dream was performed in the woods of the Federal University of Santa Catarina. The four open air performances were of great success and well received by the audiences. The 33 actors and crew members involved in the production were almost all students about to graduate, participating in a beautiful process of putting into practice all their knowledge accumulated in four years of performing arts studies. The production was made a part of the festivities for the first graduating class in Performing Arts at the university and brought together many of the members that today constitute the Elefants Theatre Company.

The director and creative head Márcio Cabral is an experienced professional who graduated in Drama at INDAC (Instituto de Arte e Ciência – Institute of Art and Science) in São Paulo, under the tutelage of Antunes Filho. Cabral used to be a substitute professor of Performing Arts at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where he also taught classes in ‘Art Direction’; ‘Acting’; ‘Staging’; ‘Theatrical Make-up’; ‘Lighting’ and ‘Ethics and Aesthetics’ for five semesters, having been accepted by the institution as a professor right after graduation.

About the P Language

The P Language is a child’s game. One group of children communicate using it as another group tries to understand and, eventually, reproduce it. After each syllable, you add the letter ‘P’ together with the vowel that comprises that syllable. For example, if you have the word ‘teatro’, it becomes ‘te PE a PA tro PO.’

In this production the P Language is used to clearly mark the exact moment in which both Juliet and Romeo meet and fall in love, which is – as the theater group tries to symbolize – the very moment when they stop speaking the “P Language” and start speaking “as adults,” as if they’ve suddenly grown up. Similarly, the public also fails to grasp what they say in the beginning – while they still use the P Language – and, as time passes (and obviously they start speaking regular Portuguese), the audience starts understanding them. Juliet and Romeo have grown up in order to live their love story, and the audience is engaged through the usage of this technique.

In the last scene, when Juliet and Romeo talk to each other’s unresponsive bodies right before dying, they each revert back to the use of the P Language in one of their lines. It’s a moment of great emotion.

In the early stages of the production, while the actors were still doing table work right after a read-through, they came to understand something about the P Language; something that made them hold on to this idea, even though they knew it would mean a lot of work. They realized that this could be a way for them to play with the language, similar to what Shakespeare did. It would be a way to break away from the established language patterns and bring a vivacious atmosphere to their work, just like the Bard did when, for similar purposes, he brought Blank Verse, Rhyme, Alexandrine and Prose to Romeo and Juliet. The Elefants Theatre Company see the P Language as their humble way of imitating some of Shakespeare’s writing characteristics in a figurative and emblematic manner.

Cast & Crew

General Direction: Márcio Cabral

Romeo: Willian Mario
Juliet: Paula Dias
Friar Lawrence: Lorenzo Lombardi
Nurse: Marina Bento

Lights: Gabriel Guedert
Adaptation/settings/costumes/soundtrack: Márcio Cabral
Video: André Zacchi

Special thanks to Lorenzo Lombardi and Marina Bento Veshagem for their collaboration and contribution, providing production details, background information, and transcription and translation support.