On a different kind of safety....

Lost Dog’s Executive Producer, Daisy Drury considers pressing the edges of her emotion shoebox with the return of Juliet & Romeo.

Tonight Lost Dog’s production of Juliet & Romeo goes back on stage again for the first time in two years. As our Romeo would say, I have ‘big feelings’ about it.

Juliet & Romeo imagines what might have happened if Shakespeare’s young lovers hadn’t died in the vault but had lived on into middle age. We meet them as they begin to come to terms with the possibility that despite the incandescent promise of their early passion, they are, in fact, ordinary and possibly no longer in love.

In remounting it we have been preoccupied with keeping everyone safe – cast, crew, audiences – physically safe that is, Covid safe. But in thinking about watching the show again I began to ponder a different kind of safety. Without wishing to sound too pub psychologist I’m going to call it emotional safety.

I have a sense that the pandemic has flattened my emotional spectrum. Explosions and car chases in James Bond? Kapow, yes please! Cosy morality in Ted Lasso? Aah lovely. Hats, hunks and happy endings in Bridgerton. Thanks very much. Swoony romantic orchestras on Classic FM? More please! South Pacific at Chichester? Happy talky talky. Charles Cummings and his insouciant spies? Bring it on!

But anything that might touch the edges of my carefully pandemic constructed emotional shoebox; anything that involves the truth; anything that is described as searing (bloody everything is searing these days); and God forbid anything that involves a child suffering in any way? Nope, no thank you, not today, that’s not safe.

Last week Paul McCartney on Radio 4 had me gulping back the tears as he finally acknowledged that Yesterday might actually be about his mother dying of cancer when he was barely a teenager (‘Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say’…..sob). I’m just about managing the repressed pain and windswept loneliness of the new season of Shetland but only because I know Douglas Henshall will solve the crime.

I may be alone in feeling like this. I’m aware it makes me a bit of a coward and it reeks of my good fortune in actually having the choice to dodge it. But there it is.

But back to Juliet & Romeo and the reason I’m writing this. If there are people out there who are feeling a bit like me, then this show (if theatre is your thing) might be the moment to push at the edges a bit. It’s sad. It’s about disappointment and the million ways we find to hurt the people we’re supposed to love. You will probably cry a little bit. But you’ll also laugh. It’s wickedly funny and light-hearted and tender and sexy and a cracking good night out.

So, if you’re in London or Worthing or Bath at any point in the next week and you fancy joining me and the Lost Dog team bouncing off the walls of your emotional shoebox then come on down. And if you do start to cry and suddenly realise that now you've started you might never be able to stop, then I promise that one of us will be there at the end to give you a hug and help you put the shoebox back together again.

Photo by Sarah Weal, featuring Kip Johnson & Soléne Weinachter.