When Romeo and Juliet by Brazil’s Grupo Galpão (dir. Gabriel Villela) was performed at the Globe theater in London in 1992, it was said to have brought back a new freshness to Shakespeare. That was probably because the performance was conceived for the street – the world of fairs, pubs, and squares – where, side by side, one finds the politician and the laborer, the businessman and the peddler, the student and the prostitute, the public officer and the unemployed, children and old people, just as it used to happen at the English inns of old where the Elizabethan theater developed.
Shakespeare in a popular universe
This popular universe is like Shakespeare’s: metamorphic, dynamic, and unpredictable, like a circus. (See Figure 230.)
230. Eduardo Moreira of Grupo Galpão, in Romeo and Juliet (1992).
This circus world regulates the swift, internal movement of actions, feelings, and metaphors of Shakespeare’s work, and the quick changes and nimbleness that guide the tragedy of the couple from Verona. In this tragedy, we find the circumstances necessary for fortune’s blows to fall more poignantly on the characters and the audience involved with the story. This production echoes claims that have been made about these two iconic characters since the eighteenth century: we have, side by side, joy and tears, balm and poison, swords clashing and the soul trembling in endless alternation. And we see in this production the long-standing claim about Shakespearean character and story that it is in the situations of the common man that Shakespeare finds the universality of the human being and his eagerness to confront and construct his fate. There is no dichotomy between the erudite and the popular. One interacts with the other and means nothing without it, just like what happens between the couple’s love and the hostility that dominates Verona.
Romeo and Juliet are permanently in danger and throw themselves headlong into the tense and unpredictable game of love and death. As they move beyond the archetypal characters of the Nurse, the Friar, the Prince, the villain (Mercutio), and others, Romeo and Juliet go forward toward their fate as if they were walking along a tightrope at the same time as they progressively exile themselves from Verona and the banalities of its conflicts. The higher they reach, the more they oscillate and the closer they are to falling. The mise-en-scène of Grupo Galpão was prepared by having the actors walk along boards three meters above the ground so that the risk of falling and the effort to maintain their balance like trapeze artists in a circus might be incorporated in the words cast into space. (See Figure 231.)
231. Chorus/Shakespeare (Antônio Edson) moves toward Juliet (Fernanda Vianna) and Romeo (Eduardo Moreira) during the Capulet party.
The actors’ bodies impress on the words the tension and the vibration with which they must be pronounced and received by the audience as they watch, tense with suspense, as if they were around a circus ring. And it was a moving arena set up on squares, fairs, and crossroads that the car used in this performance of Romeo and Juliet was turned into in order to mambembar through the heart of Minas Gerais and then Brazil and throughout the world. In Brazil the African words mambembar and mambembe (“faraway place”) refer to itinerant circus performers or theater players. They move around just as “strolling players” did in Shakespeare’s time, setting up their stage anywhere, in places such as fairs and squares of country towns, where they perform before moving on to another locality. (See Chapter 209, “Shakespearean Players in Early Modern Europe.”)
At the end of the performance, after money had been put in the hat, the circus was pulled down and the stage once more metamorphosed into a car to take the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to other places. Everything in Shakespeare is metamorphic, like a child’s magic world. Shakespeare knows that such magic, which the science of his time was beginning to lose, continued nevertheless in the soul and the mystery of the human imagination.
Rewriting Shakespeare rewriting an Italian original
Shakespeare’s play is a rewriting of previous versions of the tragedy of Verona. The adaptation by Galpão is also a rewriting of the Bard’s text that galloped on the rhymes of Onestaldo de Pennafort’s translation, influenced by the lyrical, dreamlike, and playful universe of the baroque and the popular culture of Minas Gerais. In the same way that Shakespeare introduced the character of the nurse, this production introduces the narrator, who, using the language of novelist Guimarães Rosa and that of the rural areas in Minas Gerais, contextualizes the play and uncovers new meanings and environments in which to develop it. As the lovers are in conflict with the town and their families and are later divided by the exile imposed on Romeo, they only find consolation and solidarity in the cosmic. In this production, it is to that idea of the cosmic that they address their complaints, their despair, their confessions, and their anguish. In keeping with this approach, Galpão performed its adaptation, in open spaces, turning the mountains, the twilight, the stars, and the public into a privileged audience for the characters’ solitude. The natural landscape enters the production, participates in it, and directs the voice, the gaze, and the bodies hurtling toward the cosmos.
From the streets of Minas Gerais into the streets of the world
This circus-like, tragic, and youthful universe is echoed in Rosa’s “sertanês” (a dialect created from the language peculiar to Guimarães Rosa, the famous writer from Minas Gerais), goes vertically through the “seresta” music from Brazilian folklore, and is highlighted in the faded clothes worn by Romeo and Juliet, whitened like the walls of the houses and churches of Minas Gerais, which contrast with the dark clothes of the other characters. The growing conflict between the couple and Veronese society – more than the conflict between the two families awakened in the end by the deaths of the two young people – gives movement to the dramatic course of Shakespeare’s play. To remake it in the Brazilian context and to steep it in the circus-like, popular universe typical of the streets is to find anew Shakespeare’s meaning today (Leite Reference Brandão1999, 92–120).
The iconic figures of Romeo and Juliet carry the popular claim of universality today in part because the play makes us rediscover a kind of love that is free, a way for us to construct our humanity and our fate, which we are responsible for in a world dominated by business and by pragmatic, banal, and utilitarian relationships. Such love, no matter how mambembe it is, is really what must also be performed in our twenty-first–century Veronas.
