"My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite"

Juliet, Romeo and Juliet (Act II, Scene 2)

Stephen Drover’s iteration of Romeo and Juliet approaches the work from a place of academia hailing from Langara College’s Studio 58. All aspects of the work from the sound work and set design to costuming and character idiosyncrasies, includes allusions to former iterations, most notably the film adaptation,Romeo + Juliet (1994) and film departure, West Side Story (1961). Studio 58’s Romeo and Juliet is a playful experiment in structure and the work’s history of retelling.

Dean: Hello my name is Dean Thivierge and I’m here today with the director of Studio 58’s production of Romeo and Juliet, Stephen Drover. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today!

Stephen: My pleasure.

D: Alright, sweet. Let’s get right into it! First question I have, generally: How would you describe your relationship to Shakespeare? 

S: Shakespeare has been a part of my professional life for about 20-25 years. I’ve always been interested in not just Shakespeare as a playwright but Shakespeare as a culture creator. I know that sounds a bit lofty but, I think that the work he’s created is so ubiquitous and so entrenched in our understanding of narrative and in what we see as tragedy and comedy. We see it in so many ways that it’s hard to avoid. When I engage with Shakespeare’s work it’s not so much because of the poetry– a lot of people go for it for the poetry– but I’m just as interested in the structure, the narrative, and the story and how it reminds us of things as it goes. There is a tendency of people to bring intertextual references to it and their own cultural capital to the understanding of the work. Shakespeare, in my experience, does that better than anyone. It provides us a rather permissive vessel for putting our own stuff into it. There’s a reason why it’s done all over the world in so many languages. It’s not just about the poetry and the words. That’s a long-winded way of saying it’s been on my mind for a long time. [laughing] 

D: I get it. Recently I was reading this paper– I’m blanking on the name but it was essential about how Star Wars has a sort of cultural capital that has led it to now be reiterated so many times that it becomes more of a narrative diving point.

S: Yeah that’s right and Joseph Campell was really into the idea of the model myth and the idea that there is only a certain amount of fixed narratives available to us in our imagination. We’ve just been rehearsing different ways of telling them for hundreds of thousands of years. Star Wars does that well and resonates in a way that taps into archetypal echoes and ancestral feelings. Shakespeare does that in a really special way, albeit with the invitation to adapt. I would argue the requirement to adapt.

D: I think that’s absolutely beautiful. Recently I was reading one of your works actually, The Process of Departures– 

S: Oh you read that! So you’re the one. [laughing]

D: Yeah! I’m the one guy on that. –especially that idea of categorizing adaptation. I find that a lot of the work that I’m producing as a contemporary artist is very citational in that way but it feels like it's nice to extend that throughout all aspects of the work. I feel like contemporary art gets written off where “it’s so citational, “it’s so derivative”. But, everything we’ve ever done is just mirroring other things. 

S: I know, you go back to that idea that there’s no such thing as an original idea anymore but it doesn’t matter. I had someone ask what I was doing with a particular show and they said something snarky like “well that’s been done” and I said “but I’ve never done it”!

D: No kidding, no kidding! [laughing] How do you approach a new script with that in mind? 

S: Like a non-Shakespeare brand new play?

D: Just anything! Shakespeare, brand new play, any sort of new work where maybe you’re onboarded or maybe it’s something you’ve been discovering for yourself. 

S: I tend to analyze it in terms of structure and how it’s built: what the dramaturgy of it is. If it was a house what would its architecture be? How is the architecture arranged in such a way that it can guide the audience through certain experiences. When you zoom out you can see a picture of the play. I tend to not worry about character or language– not yet anyway. I’m more interested in what the shape of it is: what the music is in certain respects. 

D: Like a sort of narrative floor plan?

S: Yeah yeah, sort of. It’s informed by narrative theory. A lot of my work with scripts is understanding the narrative legacy it walks in. What is the shape of the play? What kind of play is it? What do I think audiences are going to think about when they watch this play? Will they think about Star Wars or will they think about the Godfather? [laughing] Will they import these intertextual references in order to create meaning? I think it’s important for creators of a new play to understand what kind of legacy the play walks in and what kind of narrative tradition it inherits. That’s my big picture zoom out approach. That’s where I'd like to live when I’m trying to understand how a play works.

D: Sweet, I like that. I know this isn’t your first time staging something from Shakespeare. We already kind of touched that briefly. [laughing] How would you describe the difference in process going from Bard to Studio 58 to even Titus (Bouffonicus) back in 2017?

S: This was a unique process because Studio 58 asked me to direct a Shakespeare work and they told me I could direct any I wanted. They said here’s the cast, these 20 people, and you cast them however you want but you have to work with these 20 people. I had an ensemble I had to accommodate. With people who are 21-22, I’m not going to give them King Lear. I wanted to harness and to benefit from a young energy so, I chose Romeo and Juliet. Doing it in an educational institution provides a certain degree of permissiveness that I probably wouldn’t get at Bard on the Beach or somewhere else where the pressure to sell tickets and to make money is prevalent. I’d like to think as a director working in a pedagogical environment that the priority is the education and not the show. I made choices in the production to challenge and provoke the actors to think about how the play works and what it is and how larger theatrical mechanisms inform an audience's experience. That’s a very heady response but the short answer is that there was a certain degree of freedom in something like this that I wouldn’t normally have.

D: Did that lead to more work in playing with the devisement of it and movement work?

S: To some degree, it gave me freedom to broaden my circle of what if. I thought we could do something completely ridiculous. Not ridiculous but ambitious and audacious. I think I make my best work when I think I don’t really know what I’m doing. [laughing] By that I mean I enter into the project with a question rather than a clear absolute knowledge that it’s going to work. I like working on something where I can go, “I’m not actually sure how this is going to work”. I really want to treat the process as an inquiry and as an opportunity to respond to a prompt or a question that– probably I provided to myself and in this case it was how time works and how the play invites us to construct narrative on a timeline. I think Shakespeare’s play does in it’s own way but I wanted to interrogate that a little bit.

D: Would you say that the performance research approach is informed from your time in Master’s school?

S: Oh yeah, so much of the way that I approach the work is informed by scholarship, research, academia. It’s informed by reading scholarly work in addition to researching production history and again trying to outline what the  narrative legacy is. I read a lot of scholarship and find it very inspiring. It stimulates ideas in a way that I don’t get anywhere else

D: I find that those sort of works can be more accessible for me. Because of the nature of creation sparking from across the world I like to be able to see what’s happening in Australia or what’s happening in the UK. I find that reading and watching stuff about it is so much more accessible.

S: Yeah, yeah. Even reading peer-reviewed academic journals I find very exciting in a way that I think there are ideas that I don’t think I would have had if I didn’t have access. I think as a theatre practitioner we tend to peu peu academia. “Those are the thinkers and we are the makers” and never the twain shall meet. I think that actually has been the case but, I’m really interested in exploring how scholarly thinking informs how we perceive work. One of my favorite scholars is a woman named MJ Kidnie, she teaches at Western University in Canada. She wrote this wonderful book called: Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. She offered this idea that every version of Romeo and Juliet whether it's Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story or Gnomeo and Juliet or what we’re doing tonight, are all valid iterations of the same ongoing work. There is no original, there is just a conversation that’s been going on for hundreds of years and every time you engage with Romeo and Juliet you’re engaging with that conversation. That just blows my mind a bit. When I share it with actors they go “oh ok, it’s not my job to do it right” or to honor the source material or to put Shakespeare up on this pedestal, he’s just part of a larger conversation. It’s inspiring to think about Shakespeare as a collaborator rather than a boss; it frees up creative juices in a really exciting way. That’s an example of how I access scholarly thinking and apply it to the work in an inspiring way I hope.

D: Could you speak to what sort of “flavor” of adaptation you’re going for tonight?

S: Sure. I’ve been very hesitant to speak a lot about what we’re doing tonight because I don’t want to ruin any surprises but I think part of Romeo and Juliet is going in with some knowledge. There’s something interesting about entering in not totally ignorant. When we come to see a production of Romeo and Juliet for the most part we have a rough idea of what kind of story we’re going to see. Even if you don’t know Romeo and Juliet you kind of know it a little bit. You know it’s about two kids who fall in love and who kill each other in the end, at the very bare bones. It’s been called the world’s greatest love story, all that stuff. The thing that I found particularly interesting about Romeo and Juliet is that it starts with a prologue that tells you how it’s going to end. Shakespeare doesn’t do that anywhere else in his canon. “Two households both alike in dignity”; within 2 minutes he says they’re going to die in the end. By the time we start the play we already know how it’s going to end, in many ways it’s already happened. It’s already foreign conclusion, we can’t do anything about it. The process of watching Romeo and Juliet isn’t asking: “What’s going to happen?” it’s more “How did this happen?”. It’s a process of forensics. For a story that we pursue already knowing how it goes, I thought lets dig into that and understand how we construct narrative when we already know what the ending is. What we’re doing is telling the story backwards. It starts with the two dead kids in the tomb and every scene is treated like a prequel to the previous scene. Again, I’m not the first to do this! [laughing] Colleen Murphy did it wonderfully with The December Man, Harold Pinter did it with The Trail and film wise it was done with the film Momento (2000) but I’ve never seen it done with Shakespeare. I didn’t exactly know how to do it and it was going to be confusing. We go “ok so we’re going backwards…where did we come from?”; every time we go to an end of the scene we jump back to the previous scene before it. It’s been incredibly eye opening, I feel now I know the play more than I ever did before. 

D: That in itself is an academic approach. It feels like a very David Ball Backwards and Forwards. [laughing]

S: [laughing] No you’re right! I talked about David Ball to the cast and I don’t know if they read the play but the way to understand how a play works is to read it backwards and treat every action like a domino and go “what made this happen and now what made this happen?” Every scene we go: “How did we get here? Well let’s look at that!” Then we go to the prequel and we’re very good at prequels now! (People right now are) better suited for this kind of structure than any people in history because we’re just really good at going– mostly in movies –”what is the origin story?” or "what was the thing that came before that?”. We take big time jumps like the Games of Thrones prequels, hundreds of years earlier. We import the knowledge we have of the previous material and apply it to this and go “oh that’s how we go there!”. It’s a very satisfying kind of adaptation where you’re comparing what you’re experiencing with your knowledge of the source. You’re having this process of comparison. It’s very satisfying. You go, “Oh yeah! It’s just like that!”. This is a variation on that sort of thing.

D: Well, I for one am stoked! [laughing] Thank you so much for being here with me today.

S: Thank you for your questions. I appreciate it! Thanks for the opportunity to talk about it.

Studio 58’s Romeo and Juliet is running until November 30th 2025. Be a part of the conversation. Get your tickets, at https://langara.ca/studio-58.