Rosaline is eaten up by unrequited love for Romeo and the conviction that Juliet was responsible for all the deaths and for the fate of the four people who are on trial for their lives. She's down a long way and has a journey to go but she is always fighting. She is a very feisty lady. There is hope that she is going to come through that deep despair of adolescence is to a place where there is light and life. In the end she is redeemed by Benvolio’s innocent love. I find myself in somewhat of a quandary penning this review, since I was not -and still am not -quite sure of what I was watching. Was it a play, a Masque, a fantasia, a choreographic display or an intellectual ego trip? In the cold light of afterwards, I am inclined to think it was all of these, but the balance was heavily weighted in favour of the last two. He loves and would perhaps repeat Romeo's folly, but he is more aware of the possible price to pay – nothing is as simple after Romeo and Juliet as it seemed before, the world is greyer, less clear cut. The climax of the play comes during an election to determine whether or not Rosaline or Petruchio (Tybalt's brother) will succeed Tybalt as the Prince or Princess of Cats. The election fails to have any results and the fate of the truce is left open-ended. [5]

Once upon a time in fair Verona, Romeo and Juliet lived, loved and died, leaving in their wake two grieving families and a violent feud only tentatively resolved. So what happened next? These anachronisms are funny, but they’re also disorienting; Trépanier wants the audience to “feel like they’re in a world which they once understood, but has since been subverted – which is essentially what the characters are feeling as well”. The production team have expanded on this anachronistic aesthetic by mixing the 16th century Italian setting with elements from 1950s post-war Italy. That period, much like the aftermath of Romeo and Juliet’s suicides, is one in which society is supposed to be evolving, yet all the old structures are still in place, and no-one knows quite what they’re supposed to do with themselves any more. Shakespeare situates this maturation directly after Juliet’s wedding night, linking the idea of development from childhood to adulthood with sexual experience. Indeed, Juliet feels so strong that she defies her father, but in that action she learns the limit of her power. Strong as she might be, Juliet is still a woman in a male-dominated world. One might think that Juliet should just take her father up on his offer to disown her and go to live with Romeo in Mantua. That is not an option. Juliet, as a woman, cannot leave society; and her father has the right to make her do as he wishes. Though defeated by her father, Juliet does not revert to being a little girl. She recognizes the limits of her power and, if another way cannot be found, determines to use it: for a woman in Verona who cannot control the direction of her life, suicide, the brute ability to live or not live that life, can represent the only means of asserting authority over the self. Most of the comedy derives from similar tensions; though “& Juliet” is jokey, and its authorship is entirely male, its feminist critique is real enough, winking alternately at Shakespeare’s assumptions and ours. At one point, Anne summarily up-ages Juliet by about a decade because she’s “not going clubbing with a 13-year-old” — nor (it goes unsaid) letting a 13-year-old marry. Nevertheless, May (Justin David Sullivan) is a typically clever modern gloss on Shakespeare — a playwright, as Anne points out, who is “basically synonymous with gender-bending.” And if three of the couples, liberated by Juliet’s liberation, achieve surprisingly normative happy endings, the girl herself ends the show uncommitted, still trying to “own her choices,” apparently by not making any.

ELSPETH: Looking after a person, being responsible for them. That's hard learnt [...] You taught me to care, my God. Demanded that I ... that I care. With your screaming and your crying and your wee hands that beat at me and grabbed at me [...] Just because you're all grown up. I've to stop? All that caring. I've to stop?' After Juliet is a play written by Scottish playwright Sharman Macdonald. [1] It was commissioned for the 2000 [2] Connections programme, in which regional youth theatre groups compete to stage short plays by established playwrights. As it turns out, Rosaline and Benvolio’s relationship (which is mostly one-sided) is such a small part of this short but fascinating work. This is more of an exploration of Rosaline’s thoughts following the tragedy and, even more broadly, the thoughts of Verona as a whole. Most of the scenes consist of the characters discussing the events of Shakespeare’s play and trying to make sense of them—who should be blamed for all of the recent deaths? Should the two families remain at peace, or is that a fruitless endeavor? Did Romeo and Juliet even really love each other? She is a Capulet, a cousin of Juliet, and loved Romeo, and ironically is the lady whom Romeo claims to love at the start of his play, though she rejected his every advance. In After Juliet the embargo on weapons is being enforced but the feud between the young Capulets and Montagues is simmering. Rosaline, convinced that there should be fighting, raids the tomb to get the only swords available. Implacable Valentine does the same so that when the new Prince of Cats is elected, ‘the days will breathe again.’ Rosaline forces the Capulets to choose between peace and war. After she is elected Princess of Cats, she fights Valentine with total conviction. However, she is unable to sustain her animosity when Benvolio takes up the fight and simply challenges her to kill him. She is not exactly enthusiastic in response to Benvolio’s passion but at least she takes his hand and promises that, in the spring, she will wear that special green dress that he liked, pale, pale green.

Just before dawn, Romeo prepares to lower himself from Juliet’s window to begin his exile. Juliet tries to convince Romeo that the birdcalls they hear are from the nightingale, a night bird, rather than from the lark, a morning bird. Romeo cannot entertain her claims; he must leave before the morning comes or be put to death. Juliet declares that the light outside comes not from the sun, but from some meteor. Overcome by love, Romeo responds that he will stay with Juliet, and that he does not care whether the Prince’s men kill him. Faced with this turnaround, Juliet declares that the bird they heard was the lark; that it is dawn and he must flee.Indeed, it’s Anne who provides most of the wit, not just verbal but philosophical. And it’s Wolfe’s performance — capped with a roof-raising rendition of the Celine Dion hit “That’s the Way It Is” — that gives the show its heart, an organ too often unheard from in musicals entirely focused on the ear. The two lovers are dead and the Prince has forced peace upon the two households, the Capulets and the Montagues, but as everyone knows too well an enforced truce is barely a truce at all. Baz Luhrman’s film of Romeo and Juliet with Clare Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio prompted Sharman Macdonald’s 13-year-old daughter Keira Knightley to tell her to write play about Rosaline. Undoubtedly Rosaline appears on stage in Romeo and Juliet and at the Capulet’s party but she is not in the cast list and, although Romeo is besotted with her in Act I Scene 1, she is only mentioned twice. The daughter's demand together with the film's electrifying music and the tough sinewy style that made the Shakespearean language a dialect that young people could use, led Sharman Macdonald to speculate on how she could explore what happened in the days immediately after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. The Girl With Red Hair (2003) has been highly acclaimed. Once again, it explores mother-daughter love in a Scottish coastal setting, though this time it is more tragic: 17-year-old Roslyn, the red-headed girl of the title, has been killed in a car accident a year previously, and the play explores not only the devastating grief of her mother, but the impact on the whole community. The intensity of the subject-matter is lightened by touches of humour and the gradual suggestion that the bereaved may begin to heal, learn to love again and move forward with their lives.

The plot of After Juliet is quite sparse. Honestly, it’s more of an extended epilogue to Romeo and Juliet (albeit with a cast of almost exclusively new characters) than its own narrative. I didn’t mind this, but it does stop the play from having a stronger identity of its own. I wasn’t a huge fan of most of the characters: Rosaline, the text’s clear pride and joy, was surprisingly underdeveloped after all that I had heard about this work (although I recognize that all of her lines and behavior could certainly be bolstered by a dynamic performance) and Benvolio (the only real character of significance in this play that also had a considerable role in Romeo and Juliet) was disappointingly reduced to nothing more than a puppy dog mooning after her. However, this could very well be my retelling bias at play: I was so enamored with the Rosaline and Benvolio of Melinda Taub’s Still Star-Crossed (the book, not the TV series of the same name) that they somehow became my quintessential versions of the characters, and it’s possible that I would have liked After Juliet's interpretations of the characters more had I not been exposed to so many other versions beforehand. Lady Capulet calls to her daughter. Juliet wonders why her mother would come to speak to her so early in the morning. Unaware that her daughter is married to Romeo, Lady Capulet enters the room and mistakes Juliet’s tears as continued grief for Tybalt. Lady Capulet tells Juliet of her deep desire to see “the villain Romeo” dead (3.5.80). In a complicated bit of punning every bit as impressive as the sexual punning of Mercutio and Romeo, Juliet leads her mother to believe that she also wishes Romeo’s death, when in fact she is firmly stating her love for him.The scenes are linked and interspersed by the very lovely peripatetic flute playing of Julia Gibb, with music composed by one of the Progresss resident music masters, Peter Charles. In a moment reminiscent of the balcony scene, once outside, Romeo bids farewell to Juliet as she stands at her window. Here, the lovers experience visions that blatantly foreshadow the end of the play. This is to be the last moment they spend alive in each other’s company. When Juliet next sees Romeo he will be dead, and as she looks out of her window she seems to see him dead already: “O God, I have an ill-divining soul! / Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low, / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb. / Either my eyesight fails, or thou look’st pale” (3.5.54–57).