Shakespeare RE:Loaded; 2:1 My Insight

For our Shakespeare RE:Loaded brief, we discussed different ideas as a class about what themes in Romeo and Juliet are present in contemporary London to attract teens to go see the play. Some suggestions were forbidden love, conflict and fantasy. We then went to Waterloo Station and took pictures of the station to use as mockups for our posters. There were many options for our work to be displayed such as through the large LED board, banners hanging from the ceiling, under the stairs, on the stairs, on the platform barriers, on the clock etc.

My initial insight was to use the quote “What’s in a name?”, spoken by Juliet in the play, and related it to usernames on social media and to create fake social media profiles for the characters. My second insight was to have a fake Facebook article about two teens who committed suicide to be with each other, and have fake comments from users saying

“RIP.”.

I pitched this idea to my peers, our lecturer Derek Yates and to Brian Sheppard who works in advertising. The feedback to my insights were that they were not insights and that they were basically bad ideas that didn’t connect the play to contemporary London properly. After accepting that my ideas sucked, I looked in to more themes of the play and decided to use miscommunication.

My insight is that Juliet couldn’t get to Romeo (in time) because of miscommunication.

In the play. Juliet’s letter about faking her death doesn’t get to Romeo and so he believes she really killed herself and so kills himself, showing the extreme consequence the miscommunication had.

I thought back to an ad made by Barclays to show how easily we give access to things on our phone and wanted to do something similar with using phones and realised that miscommunication in today’s world can be through text messages; one typo could change the whole meaning of the message.