Reel Me In

David Tennant on playing Romeo (excerpt from Players of Shakespeare 5: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company): The thing about Romeo and Juliet is that everyone seems to think they know what it’s about. You don’t have to talk about it for long before people start saying things like ‘the greatest love story ever told’ and spouting famous lines. ('Wherefore art thou Romeo’ has to be one of the most overused and most misunderstood quotations in the English-speaking world.) When I found out that I was going to be playing Romeo for the Royal Shakespeare Company I was at first thrilled, then nervous, and then rather snowed under with unsolicited opinion: 'O, it’s a wonderful part’; 'terribly difficult’; 'such beautiful poetry’; 'O, he’s so wet’; 'he’s so wonderfully romantic’; 'Why on earth do you want to play Romeo? Mercutio is the only part to play’; 'of course Romeo is always upstaged by Juliet’; 'it’s the best of Shakespeare’; 'it’s absolutely Shakespeare’s worst play’ - and so on, and on, until it soon became evident that to attempt such a part in such a play might be at best ill-advised and at worst total and utter madness. It was certainly clear that I couldn’t hope to please all of the people all of the time and that even pleasing some of the people some of the time was going to be pretty tricky. However, I had always wanted to play Romeo. I thought it was a great part full of very recognizable emotions and motivations, with a vibrant youthful energy and a sense of poetry with which anyone who has ever been a self-dramatizing adolescent can identify. It is suffused with the robust certainty and cynicism of youth, but crowned with a winning and rather beautiful open-heartedness.

And it’s a great story brilliantly told, full of passion, wit, politics, intrigue, life and death, and topped off with lashings of s*x and violence. […] And I was running out of time. There is no explicit reference in the text to how old Romeo is, but he is, undeniably, a young man. I didn’t have very many years left. I’d always said to myself that it was a part I would have to do before my thirtieth birthday or not at all. Actors older than that have played the part, of course, and I don’t doubt that they’ve done it very well, but I wanted to set myself a deadline. (There are, after all, few more tragic sights than a balding, middle-aged actor, corsetting in his paunch and inelegantly bounding across the stage as an ageing juvenile!) So, at twenty-eight (I would be twenty-nine before the show opened) it was now or never.

And I suppose that playing Romeo had always represented to me the first rung on a ladder that every great classical actor had climbed before ascending to Hamlet, Iago, Macbeth, and so on, finally culminating in a great, definitive King Lear before toppling over and retiring to an old actors’ home and telling ribald anecdotes into a great, plummy old age. Not that I am, for a second, categorizing myself as a 'great classical actor’, or even aspiring to such a term, but the opportunity to follow a path through these famous parts in the wake of actors like Irving, Olivier, Gielgud and others seemed thrilling, and something that, ever since drama school, I’d dreamed of doing. This is the sort of egocentric thought-process that is not entirely helpful to an actor when it comes to actually approaching a role, and I’m not particularly proud to admit to it now, but I can’t deny that it was a part (only a relatively small part, but an important one nevertheless) of what made me say yes to the RSC and to begin to find my own way through the sea of received notions of what the part meant to everyone who was so keen to give me their opinion.