Romeo And Juliet Vs Opus Arte Stage Production

Known, at least by name, to most people, Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” portrays a beautiful story around the themes of love, fate, hate and death. Many companies have presented the play, each with their own spin on it, with the two most well known being the Opus Arte Stage Production and the Baz Luhrmann 1996 movie. The Opus Arte Stage Production created a play almost identical to how it would have been presented on the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe, while Baz Luhrmann created a more modern take on the 17th-century play. Baz Luhrmann offers a modern version of the otherwise outdated play, which engages teenagers with film techniques that showcase the themes of love, fate, hate and death, compared to the Opus Arte Stage Production, which offers a faithful following of the original script. The differences are clearly epitomised through the themes, stage techniques and the film techniques of Act 5, Scene 3 in both the play and the film.

In Act
The settings of the play and the movie are vastly different; the play showing a plain bed on a wooden stage and the movie revealing a room filled with neon crosses, leading Romeo down a path to Juliet, who lies on a lavish bed surrounded by thousands of flickering candles. Although the lack of scenery in the Opus Arte stage production allows the audience to focus on the play rather than what is happening around them, teenagers in our modern society need more stimuli than just words thrown into the air. The Baz Luhrmann production symbolises fate through the neon crosses portraying God, while the close up of Juliet’s hands closed around the gun with the