Not Romeo and Juliet

Not Romeo and Juliet is an orginal clown work created by Lily Fish and Kimberley Twiner, with devising support from Giovanni Fusetti. It performed a sell out seasonat the Melbourne Fringe Festival (2018), and then was invited to perform at the Blue Room Theatre in the Perth Fringe Festival (2019). Both Fish and Twiner are experienced clowns in the Lecoq tradition but this work posed a series of questions to them as performers and makers that we navigated in development and rehearsal - how to create a traditional narrative play driven by clowns, rather than just have clown perform sketches and how can a naive clown engage with the high poetry of a canonical, classical text? Taking over from Giovanni Fusetti, their first director and co-devisor, I worked with the performers extensively in creative development and rehearsal supporting them in the generation and editing of the material, and in refining their performances. One of the challenges was how to remain true to the naive clown state - of being in the moment etcetera - whilst nonetheless driving the narrative forward as a more character actor would do in a traditional piece of theatre. During the season, the performers had to additionally navigate how to improvise with the responses of audiences - as in clowning - whilst again not completely derailing the movement forward of the text/score. In addition to being very funny, the work was a moving exploration of queer, albeit clown, love - using the classic heteronormative story of Romeo and Juliet as inspiration. The work received glowing reviews and was hugely popular with audiences.