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Romeo and Juliet become online daters unable to meet in a new project that celebrates freelance creatives
When the UK went into lockdown in March, a tempest of tweets shared the heartening (or is that daunting?) observation that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during plague quarantine. Whether true or not, the suggestion led theatre director Nadia Papachronopoulou to conceive an online drama series that imagines Shakespeare’s characters in modern-day isolation. The project puts a new spin on familiar stories and is, she says, a celebration of the arts’ huge freelance workforce, which has been rocked by a period of instability as the pandemic threatens the industry’s future.
To make Shakespeare in Isolation, she assembled two dozen freelancers from theatre and television, including past colleagues and new collaborators. The four short films, directed by Papachronopoulou, have a playful “modern twist”. Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet are reimagined by writer Lisa Keddie as embarking on a relationship online, unable to meet in person due to pandemic restrictions. Chris Woodley turns Ophelia into a Spice Girls superfan who is trying to concentrate on self-care while avoiding texts from Hamlet. Continue reading...