Baz Luhrman’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet . Midway through this film is a pivotal event: the death of Mercutio at the hands of Tybalt. It happens on a palm-fringed beach front: Verona Beach. As Romeo and his Montague friends begin to react to what has happened to Mercutio, the camera draws back for an extreme wide-view long shot. In the foreground is the proscenium arch of what was once a grand theatre on …showed first 75 words of 3067 total…

…showed last 75 words of 3067 total…the comedy, the passion and the energy of the story. As Luhrman himself says in a foreword to the screenplay: ‘We have not shied away from clashing low comedy with high tragedy, which is the style of the play, for it’s the low comedy that allows you to embrace the very high emotions of the tragedy.’[Luhrman & Pearce, p.v, (1997)] If Shakespeare could do so, I suspect he would agree with that, too. RJG 7/97