Romeo and Juliet (2022)

“O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you./She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes/In shape no bigger than an agate stone/On the forefinger of an alderman”

As part of Brighton Festival 2022, ThirdSpace Theatre (then Windmill Young Actors) brought Romeo and Juliet back with four sold out performances to relaunch the company post-coronavirus lockdowns!

Our company of 60+ performers, which now included dancers from Project Female, brought an even bigger display of physical theatre, dance, verbatim choruses, spoken word poetry, rap, stage combat to weave into the stunning text from Shakespeare.

Local young rap artist Marshall Mandiangu reprising his role as the Musical Narrator of the show.

When Brighton Festival 2022 asked ThirdSpace to be a part of their programme, we took the opportunity to bring our tale of young people torn apart by knife crime, hatred, and society that rejects them to a larger audience than we had ever had before. As such, we revamped and recreated our 2019 production with an almost entirely new cast.

Vito Taskin as the fierce Tybalt Capulet, fighting Mercutio and Romeo in the skatebowl of Hollingdean Skate Park

Our new cast engaged with the classic Shakespeare in a great way, taking his text as inspiration to write poetry, songs, and provide new words to be used as verbatim text. With our actors, we created a production of Shakespeare that was contemporary like no other, expressing the real lived experiences of young people alongside the story.

Poems written by the cast were performed throughout the story, such as when Mercutio and Tybalt are stabbed.