ROMEO & JULIET By William Shakespeare
Time: 19:30, Novermber 9/10/11, 2009
Venue: National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing
Price: RMB VIP/380/280/180/120/80
Ticket booking: 010-65516930/65516906
Directed and edited by Paul Stebbings
Original score composed or arranged by John Kenny
Presented by Milky Way Arts & Communications Co., Ltd

GULLIVER’S TRAVELS By Jonathan Swift
Time: 19:30, Novermber 13/14, 2009
Venue: National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing
Price: RMB VIP/380/280/180/120/80
Ticket booking: 010-65516930/65516906
Adapted by Paul Stebbings and Phil Smith
From Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel
Music composed by Paul Flush
Presented by Milky Way Arts & Communications Co., Ltd

TNT Theatre
The company was founded in 1980 by Paul Stebbings and other actors trained in the Grotowski method in Britain and Poland. While valuing the imaginative and physical techniques of the Polish director they wanted to extend their work into comic and popular forms with greater contemporary relevance. Their first production, HARLEQUIN, was a commedia dell’arte  based on  the life of the Russian artist Meyerhold and his struggles with Stalin. (The play was revived in 1989 and became the first play about Stalinism to be performed throughout Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall). Other productions took popular forms and explored serious themes; such as finance and fairy tales in FUNNY MONEY, vaudeville and war in ENGLISH TEA PARTY and the detective thriller and violence in THE MURDER OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Since its foundation all TNT productions have been written or edited by Paul Stebbings and Phil Smith. The company’s approach to the classics is to critically examine  the themes of the original rather than slavishly present a hallowed text. Since 2000 the company has extended this approach to interpretations of Shakespeare with considerable international success. Music plays an important role in the company’s work, and most productions include a newly commissioned score. Notable music theatre productions include CABARET FAUST    (inspired by Klaus Mann’s MEPHISTO) and the WIZARD OF JAZZ (prize winner at the Munich Biennale) both scored by the well known composer, John Kenny.  TNT’s most ambitious production to date was the integrated drama, dance and music version of Melville’s MOBY DICK, with a score by John Kenny and Paul Flush.  Other long term members of TNT are the choreographer Eric Tessier Lavigne and composer Thomas Johnson. TNT began its collaboration with The American Drama Group Europe and producer Grantly Marshall in 1993. Notable productions include BRAVE NEW WORLD,  LORD OF  THE FLIES,  FAHRENHEIT 451,  A STRRECAR NAMED DESIRE, OLIVER TWIST and many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays including our recent  award winning HAMLET. TNT has received regular funding from the British Council and the UK Arts Council and collaborated or co-produced with organisations such as the Athens Concert Hall (Megaron),  The St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre (Akimov), Tams Theatre Munich and St Donats Arts Centre (Wales) and the current long term collaborations with Costa Rica’s Teatro Terrauno (Café Britt) and Milky Way Productions in Beijing. TNT has toured from the London to Shanghai, from Guatemala to Tokyo, from Atlanta to St Petersburg and Tehran  to Berlin  in venues that range from village halls to opera houses and from castle ruins to National theatres.

PAUL STEBBINGS is artistic director of TNT theatre Britain and The American Drama Group Europe. He was born in Nottingham and studied drama at Bristol University, where he received first class honours.  He trained in the Grotowski method with TRIPLE ACTION THEATRE in Britain and Poland. Paul founded TNT theatre in 1980 and received regular Arts Council funding for work in the UK. Paul has also acted for NOTTINGHAM PLAYHOUSE and TNT and directed and written for SOUTH YORKSHIRE THEATRE, PARAGON ENSEMBLE Glasgow, TAMS THEATER Munich, the ST PETERSBURG STATE COMEDY THEATRE, the Athens Concert Hall MEGARON and the Russian TEATR EXPERIMENTA. His productions have toured to over twenty countries worldwide. Festival appearances include  WIZARD OF JAZZ at the Munich Biennale (critics prize), the Off Broadway Festival in New York, the Tehran Fajr Festival  the Tokyo International Festival, and award winning performances at the Edinburgh Festival (THE MURDER OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, in which he played the title role).  His numerous productions for ADGE and TNT include MACBETH, BRAVE NEW WORLD, MOON PALACE (a dance drama version of Paul Auster’s contemporary novel) DEATH OF A SALESMAN, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and the recent prize winning HAMLET. One of Paul´s main areas of interest is the integration of music and theatre which culminated in his large scale production of  production of MOBY DICK. He has directed productions in Russian, Greek, German and is increasingly working in Spanish, while in spring he directs THE TAMING OF THE SHREW in Mandarin at Shanghai’s leading  theatre (SDAC). In addition to GULLIVER’S  TRAVEL’S this season sees Paul direct premiers of DON QUIXOTE and OTHELLO and an Edgar Allen Poe project plus revivals of  MACBETH, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, ONE LANGUAGE MANY VOICES ( an exploration of Britain’s colonial legacy), A CHRISTMAS CAROL, CUENTA DE NAVIDAD (the Spanish version of his Christmas Carol by Teatro Terrauno in Costa Rica) and the continuing epic tour of  his ROMEO AND JULIET. These varied productions tour to over thirty countries on four continents  performing in cities as diverse as Beijing, Jerusalem, Moscow, Tokyo, Brisbane,  Guatemala, London and Berlin.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES - ROMEO AND JULIET

ROMEO AND JULIET is neither a classical tragedy nor even a traditional romance. It is a play that has become a myth, and the myth obscures the play. Great ballets, musicals and films have transformed the original beyond recognition. In approaching this most famous fiction a director must take care not to dramatise what the audience think ROMEOAND  JULIET should be, but what was written on the page two hundred years before Romanticism changed our culture. First we might ask what the play  is not. It is not a tragedy because the central characters do not suffer from “hubris”, the  fatal flaw that Aristotle defined and Shakespeare elaborated. Neither Romeo nor Juliet suffer from Macbeth’s ambition or Lear’s selfish rage, let alone Othello’s jealousy or Hamlet’s moral indecision.  Romeo’s kills Thybalt but only after failing to pacify him, and in revenge for the murder of his dear friend.  Certainly no Elizabethan audience would call him guilty. Juliet only defies her father after she marries Romeo, when legally and morally Romeo has become her Lord. (Indeed the audience are told that she has the right to reject Paris in Act one). The play is often surprisingly unromantic, Romeo and Juliet have only two scenes in the entire long play when they are alive and alone. Love itself is parodied as much as worshipped, the fullest and most complex characters in the play – Mercutio and the Nurse – are both pragmatists who mock love or treat it as an adjunct of sex. The entire play might easily be a comedy, in fact it follows the pattern of classical and Shakespearian comedy right up until the death of Mercutio. If it  were not for the entirely (it seems) accidental plague that prevents the Friar’s letter reaching Mantua then there is no reason why Juliet should not  live happily ever after with her Romeo.  Many directors have tried to make sense of  this by following WEST SIDE STORY and making Romeo and Juliet racially different – reducing the play’s complexity to literal black and white.  And also ignoring the very first line of  the text “Two houses both alike in dignity in fair Verona…”. Why should Capulet scold Thybalt for wanting to evict Romeo from his feast if the conflict was so deep?  Surely Shakespeare’s point is not that the conflict is brutal but that it is futile. This is a far more complex and indeed universal theme than simplistic race hatred. We suggest that the proper answer to the problem of how to understand and therefore stage ROMEO AND JULIET lies in its poetic form.  The entire play is constructed as a sonnet. The love sonnet was the publishing phenomenon of the 1590’s. Shakespeare himself made his name as the author of sonnets. This play explores the form and themes of both classical and Elizabethan sonnets (for technical details see below).  The play opens with a sonnet and Romeo and Juliet first speak within a sonnet. The text uses more rhyme than any other of his plays.  The form of the sonnet is also a form where endings often contradict beginnings, and this is  surely influences the structure of the play – which of course ends with a famous rhyme – just as every sonnet ends with an emphatic rhyming couplet.  Poetry allows us to approach the content of the play symbolically, rather than force it into a realistic mould. The plot has considerable weaknesses when viewed as realism (not just the accidental non-delivery of the letter but also the crucial failure of Juliet to simply go to Mantua to her Lord and husband rather than return to her family  in Act four –she is already out of the house!). Poetry works through image and symbol. The key may be the third symbolic protagonist, unseen but ever present: Death.

“Death is my son in law, Death is my heir
My daughter he hath wedded. I will die
And leave him all: life, living, all is Death’s.”  
(Capulet)

And Romeo’s last despairing jealous call:
“Death has sucked the honey of they breath!”
Death is Juliet’s last lover and both she and Romeo’s last word is “die”.

If the plague in Mantua is not a dramatist’s easy way out but a symbolic stroke of Death the play starts to make sense. Death is present from the first bloody  street fight until the last graveyard scene. We have chosen to personify Death, to explore the conflict not between different clans or even races but between love and death, Eros and Thanatos. Death unites the different themes and conflicts within the play, and even Mercutio’s “gallows humour” revels in death, at his own end he will become a “grave man”. But the play is no simple melodrama where Love and Death are good and evil. Death is seductive, a lover as well as an enemy. The poetry of the play allows the symbol to expand and create an  image of all-consuming commitment and even erotic power. Juliet captures this in perhaps the play’s most startling image:

“Give me my Romeo; and, 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”

The intensity of Romeo and Juliet’s love courts death and is sealed by it. Death freezes the Lover’s impossible passion in its moment of perfect commitment, as Romeo notes the last time he sees his love alive:

“Come Death and welcome, Juliet wills it so”

Death’s triumph is however hollow, the lover’s deaths redeem their sinning fathers and indeed the entire city. Montague promises the lovers will rise as statues in pure gold. And here the poetic symbolism develops into  the religious. Like Christ, Romeo and Juliet triumph over death by passing through it to a type of immortality,  an immortality that brings forgiveness and peace. This is the symbolic greatness of the play, the culmination of its poetic form and the goal of our production:

“The which, if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall we miss, our toil shall strive to mend.”

Paul Stebbings 2009

DIRECTOR’S NOTES - GULLIVER’S TRAVELS

GULLIVER’S TRAVELS is described by George Orwell as one of the ten best books ever written. It is  easy to agree with his opinion. The book examines the human condition with such clarity and  indeed morality, that it is hard to think of a more profound use of satire.  Satire is too easily reactionary and negative, but in the hands of Swift it is progressive and liberating. This is chiefly because Swift moves beyond the easy targets of corrupt governments and self-centred individuals to attack himself, his own nation and mankind itself. Swift savages the world and then savages himself.  Gulliver’s final adventure in the land of the horses confronts us with the idea that humans are the lowest and most disgusting of all animals. But just as we consider that idea Swift pulls us back and shows us  the cruelty of the seemingly civilised horses and the madness of the seemingly wise Gulliver – who cannot, of course, change his nature and turn into a noble horse. Gulliver journeys through five worlds: our world, where there is a balance between  the love  of his family and the cruelty of the pirates and mutineers; the  world of the little people in Lilliput, where he parodies government;  Brodbignag the world of the giants where he explores commodity and the corruption of power (physical and financial); Laputa where he explores  the absurdities of science and superstition – and finally the land of the noble horses and the beastly Yahoos.   The whole journey is also a triumph of imagination.   The helpless giant Gulliver tied down by tiny people  is one of the most enduring images in English literature. Of course it has also led to a absurd debasement of Swift’s masterpiece, turning this very adult book into a source of children’s stories and facile cartoons. What an irony that so savage and philosophical book should be so debased – almost as if we cannot bear the mirror that is held up to us so we take the story but dodge the satire. GULLIVER’S TRAVELS  portrays life as it is.  All human life is here, along with kindness and sympathy for  others, dignity in adversity and wisdom in the face of the irrational.  Swift attacks war, colonisation, corruption, lust, selfishness and  pomposity. He advocates freedom, education for women, responsible science, and respect for others. Ultimately, he asks us to accept our natural position in the world. When I was a child we had a 19th century  revised and sanitised version of GULLIVER’S TRAVELS at home. It seemed to us that in dramatising Swift’s masterpiece we must do our best to reject such simplifications and betrayals. We have attempted to explore Swift’s themes and used his structures and ideas. The satire, naturally, has been updated. In a world turned upside down by financial crisis, plunged into war by opposing irrational agendas, while we destroy the very planet that gave us life; there has never been a greater need for the deflating truths of satire. As Swift’s  book progresses so its analysis becomes more philosophical and timeless; so the later journeys to Laputa and the land of the horses can stay closer to the original narrative.  We hope we have done justice to the Swift’s caustic vision. And also entertained, Swift was one of the great originals who created British (or Irish!) humour.  From Chaucer through Shakespeare, Hogarth, Oscar Wilde, Charlie Chaplin,  Beckett and Monty Python, this tradition of humour has always celebrated not only the joy in life but the darkness, and its ultimate target is not the stupidity  of others but the folly of ourselves.

Paul Stebbings 2009