September the 10th, a day I will never forget. Why, because on that day I went together with my classmates of the International secondary school Eindhoven (ISSE) to the play “Romeo and Juliet” in “stadsschouwburg Eindhoven”. Romeo and Juliet is a story that takes place in the middle ages. The story is about forbidden love. Romeo is a Montague, and Juliet is a Capulet. The Montages and Capulets hate each other and are always fighting. Then, the prince of Rome speaks: “When there is a fight again, the peace-breaker will be executed. Romeo and Juliet fall in love and they get married in secret with the help of a priest and Juliet’s nanny’s.

After they got married a fight between the two families takes place. When Juliet’s cousin kills Romeo’s best friend, Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin. Romeo doesn’t get executed but banned. A wealthy man wants to marry Juliet, Juliet doesn’t know what to do. The priest gives Juliet a drink which will put Julia in a coma for 24 hours. Everybody will think she’s dead, and when she awakes in her grave, Romeo will be there and they will go to the city where Romeo lives now. The priest sends Romeo a letter in which he explains everything, but the letter will never arrive. When Romeo hears that Juliet is dead , he goes to her.

Because he’s feeling so sad he kills himself. When Juliet awakes she sees Romeo dead, and she also kills herself. The play of “Romeo and Juliet” where I went to was very different from the original story. The costumes of the play were not as in the middle ages, they were very modern. The scenery didn’t look like the middle ages. If there even was a scenery, it didn’t influence the play. During the play there was a lot of music because many scenes of the play were based on dancing. So, you can say that the costumes and scenery weren’t the most important things, they didn’t spent much time on it.

They did spent much time on the music and dance. The actors were young, and fanatic. All the actors were about the same age. The language was very modern, they also swore a lot like the young people do nowadays. Maybe the writer of the play wanted the audience to pay all the attention on the actors instead of the scenery or costumes. The actors danced a lot, they actually fought with dancing. The play was quite short, it was about 1 and a half hour. The original play is about 3 hours, so many scenes had to be cut out. Only the most important scenes were performed. The story itself was about the same, only a few things were different.

Tibet (the cousin of Juliet) didn’t die for example From my point of view it was a very good play, with good actors, but I expected it to be very different though. I expected a play which had the sphere of the middle ages, but it looked more like “Romeo and Juliet” in 2003. The language fit well in the modern play. One thing that surprised me was that the last scene, when Romeo and Juliet both died, was very short in relation to other scenes. I expected that scene to be longer. At the end of the evening I could say it was well worth it to see the modern version of “Romeo and Juliet”