Break out of the cocoon

The topic we choose is how the role of the feud between the two households in Romeo and Juliet became the main underlying cause of the final tragedy. The scene we select to perform are Act one scene one, Act one scene five and Act three scene one. We perform in the same sequence as that in the original play. The first scene basically establishes the adversarial relationship between the Montagues and the Capulets. Through this scene, audiences or readers should realized how entrenched the bias and conflicts are: even the servingman, like Sampson or Abram, wants to kill “any man or maid”  of the other family’s. The first scene paved the way for the larger conflicts later. Act one scene five, even though does not contain direct disharmony, is the scene when the seed of revenge is planted to Tybalt’s heart because he views the appearance of Romeo in Capulet’s party is a disgrace to him. Act three scene one, with no doubt, is when the conflict is escalated. Both Mercutio and Tybalt are dead: Mercutio dies because of his enthusiasm in defending his best friend and Tybalt dies because of his solidified mind and reluctance in believing Romeo actually loves him “better than he canst devise”.

Through the performance, I think our group did succeed in revealing the power of feud in creating the tragedy. In the first scene, I think our group did use the language to show the “ancient grudge” between the Montagues and Capulets. For example, in the first scene, as Sampson in the performance, I emphasize the sentence like “A dog of the house of Montague” and “take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s”. In the second scene, Ben, acting as Tybalt, certainly shows his bias and unpleasure immediately when he sees a member of Montague’s  in their party. Tybalt’s anger clear increases as Capulet insisting let Romeo alone. Besides, I think we did a great job in editing the lines. We deleted irrelevant sentences, like the last part of scene one when prince restores the peace and the first part of second scene where servants are serving food and Capulet is socializing with people in the party, to the topic in the scenes In order to make the performance fluent, we decided to add a monologue of Romeo  in the second scene. Meanwhile, we maintain all the important lines like “Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt’rest gall” and “A plague o' both your houses”.

However, I did failed to show the emotion expressively especially when I act as Romeo in the third scene when he sees his best friend, Mercutio, dying in front of him. I rose my voice and did not show the sadness or the rage clearly to the audience. The costume and fighting swords we added to the play is well-fit, but we did not make the fighting part intense due to the lack of rehearsal of this part. Other movements or actions could be added to improve the performance. Although we did perform more smoothly and speak louder, a deeper understanding and practise of the lines that  were recited are needed.