ROMEO AND JULIET

Romance is passion and all the action that accompanies it--kissing, shoving, loving, screaming, stroking, crying, bleeding, dying. In performance literature real voices emote real feelings as we listen.But then, whom are we really listening to? Each of us is listening in part to ourselves, giving our interpretation to the text: Juliet hears a nightingale while Romeo hears a lark. So the question naturally arises as to why someone would want to silently read a play, rather than hear it performed by skilled actors, who have an intelligent interpretation already mastered and whose words mesh with one another's in an artistic whole that can help us with our own interpretation. Kenneth Branagh and The Renaissance Theatre Company provide us simple folk with the lush richness of romantic speech in all its tumult and tension. Real voices asserting their characters' lives interacting with each other and with us, the happy voyeurs of sound. Silent print has not a chance against such energies. P.W. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB 98]