A Tender Thing

Synopsis

Another Romeo and another Juliet in a strikingly different love story. Shakespeare's language resonates through this account of an older couple whose lifetime of love is under threat. Ben Power has woven the text of Romeo and Juliet into a provocative new tale of a love that fears no challenge. Re-imagining some of Shakespeare's greatest poetry with an uncommon boldness, A Tender Thing is an elegiac yet ultimately hopeful account of the depth and power of the human capacity for love.

Our Review:

12 October 2012

Between them, playwright Ben Power, actors Kathryn Hunter and Richard McCabe and director Helena Kaut-Howson with her creative team have indeed wrought a tender and beautiful thing, a meditation on love, its longevity and endurance in old age and in the face of illness and death.

When young couples vow "till death do us part", it’s unlikely (and probably should be) that they think ahead to what the words will really, eventually mean. In Powers' wonderfully crafted reworking of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, with additions from his sonnets and other sources, time shifts to show two lovers, one couple, at different ages and stages of their relationship. Because it starts with McCabe's endearingly bulky elderly Romeo alone with his grief and his memories, we know the end before the beginning, which makes the journey more heartbreaking, but never mawkish.

In Neil Murray's spare, fluid design the couple's bed is both the marriage bed they̵...

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Latest User Review

Richard Vaughan-Davies - 17 October 2012:

It moved me to tears - but I have to try to forget the big mistake of the coda, when we see them after death. Cut that out - or preferably finish even earlier at what I thought was the death scene with the snow falling, and you've got a nearly perfect play. She was enchanting, he was fine; and what a teat to be able to read the words as well as watch the actors.And what words....

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