Working Girls, the theatre company of Bristol's Redland High School for Girls, has given us a perfectly acceptable school Shakespeare, set rather conveniently in a school. The premise in this version of the star cross'd lovers' tale is that Montague and Capulet are different houses at a boarding school (see what they did there?). So the opening street fight becomes corridor shoving, the ball becomes a school dance, and so on. Of course, the setting throws up a whole host of problems right from the start. For one thing, this is an all-girls cast, and yet the school, all Just William caps and blazers, resembles an all-boys school. But there are female pupils, I think, although the costume difference is often unclear. After a while the gender confusion spirals out of control even for a Shakespeare play.
The parent figures are possibly teachers, but possibly also just parents. And let's not get into the issues raised by pupils murdering each other; Blessing Park as ‘Principal’ Escales delivers the final ‘all are punished’ apparently referring to a severe detention. The setting was not fully thought through, then. Still, this is enthusiastically and snappily acted, and, unlike many school productions, actually has some ideas to it including well-executed physical sequences and dances, and an excellent ambient soundtrack courtesy of an unconventionally played guitar. The prologue is rather niftily sung as an opera-style overture masquerading as, what else, the school song. The rotating scene-change blackboard was an excellent touch. The pace rattles along nicely and even though the already-headlong rush into romance between the two Amys, Kennedy and Adair as the lead pair, becomes positively Road-Runner in this condensed version, it never detracted from Shakespeare's writing.
The delivery of verse suffered from the school play machine gun effect and emotional scenes were a bit shouty, but performances like Georgie Graham-Williams as the bad-kid Mercutio were fun to watch and charismatic enough to carry the play. For painless, efficient Shakespeare, you could do much worse. Not a gold star, but not a see-me-after-class either.
