Plato's Liminal Space in the Shadows of a Hermetic Theatre Form

In the shadow of a war on women and girls emerges a new ROMEO AND JULIET

Why put on a play if it is just some egocentric obsession with one's own Narcissism? I ask this question of theatre companies all around the world and especially in Australia. I above all, ask it of myself!

Theatre companies, community theatres and schools all choose to do classic theatre productions, contemporary theatre productions and even some devised works and news works out of a sense of the need for artistic expression, political affirmations and cultural concerns; that alone being enough justification for the commitment! But in today's world is this enough?

While I won't argue that we are in an insane period of time only equaled by the time of the Inquisition in Europe, though by raising this point I do see similarities, theatre needs to take cognizance of the absurdities and lies that are at the base of commonly acceptable principles. Challenging these might a reason to produce a play.

ROMEO AND JULIET AND WAR ON WOMEN & GIRLS

Are we moving towards this? Girls at nine years old can be married and even made pregnant legally? Well according to some the answer is "yes". Take a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax0vxZxDdrk

Some diabolical specifics of the Ten Commandments were obviously plagiarised by Islam. Don't covert thy neighbours "wife" etc is told totally from the male perspective. Just as the justifications for sex with young girls of nine years old within Islam is presented from a totally male perspective! One might be forgiven to think that Shakespeare was provocative in promoting a story of a thirteen year old girl wanting to be married to a young boy. In Islam marriage is essential for sex. Just as it might have been in Shakespeare's Christian times. The sexual morality for a young guy insisted on marriage; even if for multiple sexual encounters. The girl was kind of left out of the equation; a bargaining point for families.

So Juliet is 13; she is about to turn 14. If we listen to the contemporary Islamic guy in the video above, we hear it is all about her periods! Take advice from the doctors as to when one can have sex with her. Then a consummation of a legal marriage can take place! She is completely left out of the discussion. The founder of the religion was obviously careful not to impinge on this principle and, although marrying his wife when she was 6, he didn't have sex with her until she was nine!

Is this realisation "islamofobia"? NO! I'm only quoting the words of Imams, so watch the above video.

The reason for bringing this up is that while theatre might have assumed common grounds in shared values twenty or so years ago, it can no longer make such assumptions. So if one holds to such old values one must re-define the bottom line.

Juliet was to be married off to a young man at the time of her fourteenth birthday. Still young in Shakespeare's time, it was an acceptable time for marriage considering the life-expectancy of the times and the need for procreation of the species! What wasn't calculated was the unexpected intervention of Juliet's proposal to a young man, Romeo, that they should marry on the day after their meeting.

Shakespeare never mentions anything about a girl's periods, menstruation or ability to have children when calling for Romeo to have sex with Juliet. Most productions seem to side-step the brevity of their encounter and even the age of the protagonists. How often is a 25 year old actress playing Juliet? A betrayal of essential aspects of the play!

And before long, when will a trans-performer play the juvenile Juliet? If not already (Some state sponsored company must have already engaged such a proposal to ensure their funding) ...

Juliet is a young girl. In Shakespeare's time she was performed by boys.

Today, not only is a female being performed by males, some females are made to compete against males in sporting functions to an obvious disadvantage supported by laws in various communities. So have a look here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ2NYvlrO2U

Is this bias against women? Then what about the grooming gangs in England?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal

If one is following these stories, it will be obvious there is a bias against women and girls within traditionally Western culture.

SHADOWS AND LIFE

The shadows of reality are hidden and obscured. The fabricators of books of wisdom suggest answers and the procedures that must be followed to evade perpetual damnation. Charlatans abound within history and current situations. Yet all ecstatic revelations from such charlatans and would-be prophets are more likely to result from epilepsy or drug induced hallucinations. Theatre requires us to step outside and look in. And even then we probably will be wrong in our conclusions! I mean perhaps the notion of a 9 year old girl being sexually penetrated by a forty plus year old man is not necessarily a bad thing! RIGHT? See the link above! So we look in to the cultural and specifics of situations and need to make decisions! Yet all we see are the shadows on Plato's walls that tend to deceive and delude us ...

The liminality between personal experience, ideology and artistic creation is a dangerous syllogism ...

I suggest we need to be very sensitive in creating a production of ROMEO and JULIET that brings us back to the dreams of our youth and dreams of our expectations of something beautiful; something that died! Something that had nothing to do with waiting for a a girl to menstruate before fucking her! Something that took us all to a higher level where dreams followed moments of beautiful connection that stayed beyond for decades. Yes! It might seem a romantic context, but essentially it is about stepping above the biological mundanities into a spiritual realm that goes beyond the precepts of some fundamentally crippled advocate. Place your mind into that of Juliet. She is as much a prime being as any of the male usurpers of the Bible, the Tora or the Koran! Her mother, Lady Capulet surrendered her rights to her own dignity when she married Capulet! She also was a child when she had Juliet. But over the years she grew to pretend. Is this what religions ask of women? To PRETEND?

... and maybe to grow into the mindset of their captor?

BOOK HERE FOR ROMEO AND JULIET:

https://events.humanitix.com/romeo-and-juliet-sqee8xcu

Joe Woodward

(11 Jan 2025)

The Disappearing Eye

I met with a colleague at Hudson's Restaurant today to discuss lighting for ROMEO AND JULIET and my colleagues eye began to disappear

I had thought that much of individual cancelling was a myth. WOKE tends to throw cold disavowing on such a thing. I thought this until FACEBOOK, that champion of all things WOKE, cancelled my account because of some bland repost. I am actually relieved because I despise so much of FACEBOOK'S culture and process. It is in itself a reposting of the 1950s culture so clear in the film "Pleasantville" and the framework of The Truman Show. The extreme authoritarian control it has over millions of people is terrifying and something Orwell himself could never imagine. The bland demands it makes of everyday individuals reveal much of The Brave New World of Aldous Huxley. Those pictures of children and grand children and family moments all belong to FACEBOOK. They are no longer yours. Your life is no longer yours. And it is so pleasant ... that any challenge will receive swift retribution.

So Cancelled

The sad thing is, I can no longer blame the fascists. The fascists now control the left and the right of political and social persuasion. Sad really! Politics, big business and social control have merged in such a way that old definitions have disappeared. And I have lost many years of family images, key moments, posted pictures and videos from shows and major events ... as have many in the same predicament. At least, unlike in the UK, I haven't been thrown into jail because of my FB post! But I suspect this kind of thing is underway. Who would have thought the UK would become so authoritarian!

The Disappearing Eye

So on this day, I am meeting with a colleague at Hudson's Restaurant in Canberra to discuss lighting for my new production of ROMEO AND JULIET. It was going very well until I noticed I couldn't see her right eye. Her face was disappearing. No panic! I have experienced this before over twenty years. Seems it is the first sign of a migraine and not necessarily brain cancer or a stroke! So we simply kept the meeting going. We made great progress on the lighting for the show. It will be really spectacular.

Tapas and drinks from the bar may be brought into the theatre where tables of four can be booked by audiences. If they are more shy, we still have rows of seating behind the cabaret style. But this will be a production like no other from DTC.

The deeper fear I have is that as my vision for the work is forecast, elements of my life are being disappeared by authoritarian despots of collegial traitors to art and free thought. The alliance of huge businesses such as Facebook and others in the pursuit of dollars and control share little in common with the ideological allies they protect.

Suddenly my art and my existence is challenged by the fear of unseen hands using daggers to stab all I feel as being important in the back and the front and the face ... and many colleagues would stand by and smile smugly in knowing agreement ...

Joe Woodward

BOOK HERE FOR ROMEO AND JULIET:

https://events.humanitix.com/romeo-and-juliet-sqee8xcu

ROMEO AND JULIET, HERMETICISM & LOSS

DTC production of Romeo and Juliet focusing on family relations and that sense of loss through age

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare has often been described as a romantic tragedy or even as a powerplay between warring entities through which the children were like collateral damage. Whatever the cultural interpretations might be through changing historical sensibilities, the characters of Romeo and Juliet remain iconic reminders of that very short distance between childhood and young adulthood. The devastation caused by their brief and intense encounter culminated in the deadly finale. Immature idealism facilitated by adult foolish, even criminal, interventions made for the lethal outcome of Romeo and Juliet. And with their deaths lies the inevitable loss experienced through age ...

The Surreal Within Reality

We continually see updated versions of Romeo and Juliet and some in modern day costumes suggestive of contemporary contexts. The problem is that Juliet is thirteen years old. In setting the play in contemporary times, it is likely the production will de-emphasise her age or indeed portray her of a marriageable age or close to it. If for no other reason than not being able to find an actress to portray the psychological depths of the character, Juliet is mostly now seen as an older teenager or even played by a woman in her twenties.

Yet in doing this, a key aspect of the play is lost. It is that of time and the brevity of existence. How quickly the child becomes a teen and then, if not dead, an adult; all the while constantly changing and morphing into something else ... something parents may not even recognize. And sometimes the mother has rabbit-like moments as if stuck in the headlights and she freezes in recognition that her child may be much more than the little creature to which she gave birth!

Lady Capulet is a largely under-rated character in Shakespeare's play. The poignancy of her relationship with Juliet is largely un-noticed. Yet her awareness of something changing and something needed overshadows the aggressive struggle of her husband with his hardened arteries and flailing emotional and physical imbalance. For him, Juliet is a kind of product for the market; for Lady Capulet, Juliet is a mystery.

She watches her little girl. She hides her anger and her disquiet. Juliet's confidante is the Nurse; no longer her mother! It is the nurse and Juliet who share secrets; secrets kept from her mother ... secrets her mother really needed to hear.

And we are challenged by the surreal world of a child's emerging sexuality and imaginative creations while the mother is side-lined to that of observer and helpless participant in a frightening and dangerous universe.

The events surrounding Romeo's demise as a respectable young man cause his mother severe harm and then her death. We know so little of it. Yet it was the severing of her relationship with her son that directly led to her likely suicide. It was sudden and without warning. The timing of her death emerged very quickly and could not be foreseen. Her death is a foreshadowing of the fates befalling Romeo and Juliet. And it all happens so quickly.

Life and death within adult social and cultural gamesmanship leading to inter-family warfare along with the life and death explosion of two young people caught in the mire of their own sexuality and confusions surrounding rituals that are beyond their comprehension, all add to the tragedy of the play. The intertwining of these two elements becomes a surreal and somewhat dreamlike reality for both the players and the audience. We are in fact dealing with the surreal within reality; a reality that not only belongs to Shakespeare's play, but to ourselves.

The Beautiful and the Profane Within and Beyond

Something is lost once the discovery and experience of youthful touch and attraction have passed. There is a life / death / life cycle that is at once thrilling and later confined to the recesses of lived experience. Something is lost; leaving behind a blend of nostalgia and acceptance of the inevitable. But Romeo and Juliet are not real. In today's world they could not be real; and most likely could never have been real. So why do they have such a powerful hold over the imagination and cultural iconography?

Perhaps the brevity of their moment in time has something to do with it. There was never a chance for the embers of intense feeling to diminish or fade. It was the manoeuvring of others from the socially constructed world that destroyed them. While the seeds of their destruction also lay within their own actions, such a fate may well have been forestalled if not for the actions of meddling adults.

Both the Friar and the Nurse are directly implicated in their deaths. Both seemingly have a nostalgic longing for some beautiful past that might be reignited in the love between Romeo and Juliet; the Friar having an exaggerated sense of psychic and spiritual connection! Yet their actions are a profanity that should have no place within such young people's lives. Both undermine parental authority; both play power games with children who trust and rely on their support.

The idea of manufacturing reality for young people by occult and pseudo-science is certainly not confined to Shakespeare's universe. However, there are only a few examples in literature and art where such a sharply drawn construct is demonstrated.

In a world where academia and literary criticism are inextricably tied to a paradigm of intellectual control and supercilious fixations with expertise, it is no wonder the concept of hermeticism rears up and finds its own source of relevance in our story. We witness the suggestion of ancient revelations that can somehow provide understanding of the mysterious events that take hold in people's lives and in Romeo and Juliet. The separation of semantic reality from science and actual reality is as prescient in today's world as it ever was. Death is a mere construct; get over it!

The hermetic subversion of society and art provides us with paradoxical power in creation of a theatre presentation of Romeo and Juliet. As with Plato's cave and the notion of shadows that represent reality, hermeticism suggests some ancient revelation might reveal the truth of our existence. In Romeo and Juliet, this would suggest that underlying their story is a deeper level of revelation; making the particular elements of the story simply the tools for such a revelation. Death and memory become inseparable.

It might well be described as:

"a descent into the dark night of the soul. Indeed in Mallarme’s magic island is a tomb inscribed with the single word Pulchérie (Beauty) hidden behind the ‘too great’ gladiolus. Much of Mallarme’s work revolved around the idea of death. The motif was a preoccupation of his mentor Edgar Allan Poe who derived his doctrine of aestheticism from the idea that absolute beauty can only be fully grasped beyond the grave." (A.C. Evans: https://www.alchemywebsite.com/Evans_Hermetic_Art.html)

Absolute Beauty Can Only be Fully Grasped Beyond the Grave.

We need to look into the work of Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898).

"He provided a coherent philosophy of paradox (described at length by R. G. Cohn) and created an idiosyncratic style to express the subtlest nuances of thought." (Evans)

It is a two way bind. While art and theatre indeed can be a challenge to the stereotypical constructions within society, it can also lead to madness where death and living are simply abstracted constructions having little or no meaning beyond what the art says it has.

On the other hand, we as spectators have a vicarious relationship to the events on the stage. We are not related to the characters. We know they are fictional. Yet their nightly performance evokes through ritual something of the essence of an ancient revelation about the very fragility of us as ephemeral beings.

The character of the Friar taps into this academic world of semantics and ritualised spell making to placate a personal loss of place. The Friar seems to profess a need to set up a cosmic balance by playing off the lives of the young people who offer up their trust.

So Romeo and Juliet, who have no knowledge of the afore-mentioned concepts, are in fact controlled by us as the audience. Not the Friar; not parents; not the nurse ... We are party to the same profanity while feeling the loss of both the nurse and the Friar. We suffer the same fate as Juliet's mother while hopefully not falling for the action of Romeo's suicidal mother! We might feel a kind of sadness for the the protagonists or we might feel indignation that this is happening! But essentially, we all embrace the beauty of love and fascination while condemning the ultimate conclusion as a kind of profanity!

There is a strange beauty and cloying death in the tragic ending of two young people's lives in Romeo and Juliet. We could never want to meet their fate. Yet deep down, are we are envying the experience of their first encounter? Then as age piles on years, are not those shining moments of extreme beauty and fascination that ended one way or another; are not they to be viewed from beyond the grave as confirmations of something more to existence than the every-day drone. I suggest that it is somewhere in this realm that Romeo and Juliet has its most endearing power.

Older Persons and the Play

The liminality of relationship between the stage reality and the spectator poses that un-nerving recognition of my own reality and my own loss. That is, if the work is produced successfully and not as most productions try to produce something quite different ... boring and predictable!

Still, I am speaking from an older person's perspective. What of a fifteen year old watching the events unfold? And let's imagine it is being very well performed! What if they have never felt the skin on the cheek of another person? What if they have never experienced that over-whelming sensation of connection with another being? Can they participate in the event that is Romeo and Juliet? Or can they only participate in the fantasy of some Disney style version of romance vs violent ends?

Or what if all spectators have been turned cynical and no longer can feel the electricity felt by the touch of Romeo on Juliet? What if the spectator only sees an agenda that needs correcting? What if the Stalinist intrusion into human response has taken effect and all experience can be codified and pre-determined?

Then not only have Romeo and Juliet come to a nasty end ... but so too have such spectral viewers who only resemble the body and shape of experiential beings; but are little more than moving cadavers!

And the parent who watches and is disarmed by the power of performance, can only question that relationship illustrated by the parent of Juliet. She is so young. Too young! How can she feel such depths while so young?

Conclusion and Rationale for Directing

For the second time, I am directing Romeo and Juliet. Last time (2000) was for spectacle! Twenty five years later, it is for a greater mining of the family disconnection and how this relates to the world today in a seemingly bland cultural environment. The play isn't about migration. It isn't about gender politics. It isn't about Geo-political events. It is about experience ... all our experience ... a hermetic reflection!

Rather the play is about real feeling, real desires and the casing of these by a confused cultural environment: an environment that has deadly repercussions for all those who prefer DENIAL to reality! It is philosophical by taking the questions left for us by hermeticism and by the experiences of our grand-parents, our parents and by us ... It isn't just a past flirtation with sexuality and politics. What is the underworld within Romeo and Juliet that is so prominent in Orpheus and Eurydice?

I suggest it is us: the realm of the spectator. To ensure this, our production will be close to the audience involving them in total theatre of sound, lighting, video and heightened movement.

*****

Daramalan Theatre Company presents ROMEO AND JULIET by William Shakespeare

26 April - 3 May 2025 in The Joe Woodward Theatre, Issoudun Performing Arts Centre, Canberra

Tickets are now on sale:

https://events.humanitix.com/romeo-and-juliet-sqee8xcu

Joe Woodward