Director Alasdair Ramsay possesses powerful motives for this production. First is his passion for Shakespeare and his conviction that the play speaks directly to young people. Next is his experience of working with multicultural casts. Finally, his production is shaped by his consuming interest in the history of China from the 1850s to the Cultural Revolution. Ramsay’s Verona becomes Shanghai in the 1930s. “It was an extraordinarily decadent place,” he says. “Culturally diverse, a melting pot. The opium trade was in full flow, with everyone living off it.”

The setting assists his conception of the cause of the tragedy. “The play is about a struggle for money and power. Factional strife causes the death of Romeo and Juliet.” In his production the warring factions fight for control of the opium trade. Ramsay remarks that the Capulets and Montagues have been portrayed in many ways: Protestant versus Catholic, black versus white. In his setting the Capulets are Chinese, the Montagues the English community “who, in true colonial tradition, lord it over everyone else”.

That conception has implications for character and action. Friar Laurence becomes a Franciscan missionary. Prince Escalus is the opium overlord. Tybalt and Mercutio are skilled exponents of the martial arts (watch for Mercutio’s mocking delivery of “Hai!”); Capulet is a racketeer and drug baron. Ramsay sees him as a father willing to sell his daughter in the interest of getting closer to the Prince.

The setting also helps with the perennial question that dogs all productions: “What about the sex?” Ramsay again: “Shanghai was notorious for prostitution. That fact gives Mercutio’s and the Nurse’s sexual language immediate significance. It resolves the issue of a 14-year-old Juliet.” In Ramsay’s Shanghai, Juliet has grown up in a household from which her father controls a vice ring. “She’s not had sex, but she knows all about it. There’s a tenderness and sincerity in the lovers’ meetings, but Shakespeare gives Juliet language that shows she is aware of the physical aspects of love. Her ‘Gallop apace’ soliloquy is a hymn to sex.” But there’s no nudity or sexual voyeurism here.

Ramsay has cut the play to two hours, but regards the text as sacrosanct. “The only language change is that Mantua becomes Manchuria.” This promises to be a refreshingly new take. And there’s the prospect of a transfer to Hong Kong and Shanghai.

REX GIBSON

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