Cinema in Lockdown: Heightened Creative Worlds in Secret Sofa’s Romeo + Juliet
Over the past few weeks Ben and I have considered Shakespeare in Lockdown — and how Shakespearean theatre has adapted to these strange times. On Friday 14 May, we turned not to theatre but to cinema for our Shakespeare fix: joining Secret Cinema’s Lockdown alter-ego ‘Secret Sofa’ as they revisited their 2018 visit to Verona Beach and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996).
The brainchild of Fabien Riggall, Secret Cinema creates an immersive world around a usually well-known film. The audience, given roles to play, enthusiastically dress up, and enter into the world of the film interacting with actors playing characters from the film (often with unnerving accuracy). The evening culminates in a screening during which the actors recreate scenes alongside the film. As Secret Cinema put it, they create ‘360° participatory secret worlds where the boundaries between performer and audience, set and reality are constantly shifting’.[1]
In lockdown, Secret Cinema have been characteristically innovative, launching Secret Sofa, attempting to recreate the Secret Cinema experience in your own home. Taking the form of the now ubiquitous watch party, every Friday at 7.30pm UK time Secret Sofa invite you to press play on a previously announced film. However, Secret Cinema specialise in world creation, and Secret Sofa is no exception. The week starts with a Tuesday film announcement, with daily build-up on the event’s Facebook group. Members are encouraged to share costume photos, make themed food and drink, and interact with other viewers. A free-to-view Facebook live stream introduces the film creating a pre-show that nods to the larger scale Secret Cinema experience. After the film, viewers are invited to a paid for after-party via Zoom to continue the experience (with proceeds going to the Trussell Trust).
A teen of the nineties, Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet is part of me. In the summer of 2018, I went to the Secret Cinema event and it was everything I needed it to be. I had walked into one of my favourite films, transported back to 1996. My tweet on the way home after the live event sums up the impact that experience had on me:
Where Secret Cinema events tap into nostalgia for a film, Secret Sofa works on two levels: creating immersive access to a favourite film and feeding into nostalgia for the Secret Cinema event. I wasn’t alone in using photos and mementos from the 2018 event to interact with the Secret Sofa Facebook group. Indeed, at the post-film Zoom party a number of participants were wearing their costumes from 2018. The offering sits as a hybrid of the Live Online Performance and Virtual Theatre Performance models Ben and I noted earlier this week, offering viewers a variety of ways to interact with live performance.
In creating the immersive world, Secret Sofa turned to the 2018 Secret Cinema event, recreating aspects of the 2018 pre-screening immersive world — albeit truncated and reimagined for lockdown. A 45-minute Facebook live video opened with a character not featured in the film, Friar John Valentine (Daniel Dingsdale). Appropriating words from the prologue of Romeo and Juliet, Friar John introduced the feud between the Montagues and Capulets, and motioned towards an attempt of a truce — an idea itself played out at the 2018 Secret Cinema event. At that event, the audience were assigned to one of the two households, and encouraged to bring ‘peace tokens’ to exchange with rival family members — a pledge of peace being rewarded with access to secret areas or an elusive invitation to the Capulet Ball.
Placing this Secret Sofa event firmly in lockdown, Friar John noted that we, his congregation, are now contained in our homes in these ‘troubling circumstances’. But that we could all ‘conjure images of the boardwalk or strolling along the beaches of Verona or sitting in the stalls of the great Sycamore Theatre — these are memories that we have and share together’. The collective memory of the audience of the 2018 Secret Cinema event was clearly invoked by references to sets and experiences of that 2018 event at which the film was screened in a lifesize recreation of Luhrmann’s iconic Sycamore Grove Theatre.
Using Abra (Archie Backhouse) and Benvolio (Kieran Mortell) as representatives of the Capulets and Montagues respectively, the immersive interactivity of a Secret Cinema event was approximated, as viewers were encouraged to pick a family and interact using the live chat functionality. The actors read and responded to selected viewer interactions. It was here that the immersive element was strongest — both Abra and Benvolio were played by the actors that had taken on the roles at the 2018 Secret Cinema event and dressed in the equivalent costumes.
There were notable callbacks to both the film and the 2018 event. Benvolio quoted Shakespeare extensively, appropriating and adapting lines from a number of Shakespeare plays as well as the Luhrmann film. His opening speech started with ‘the boys, the boys!’ — a direct reference to the soundtrack song ‘The Montague Boys’ which plays during Benvolio’s introduction in Luhrmann’s film. He also misused Shakespearean quotes from other plays to insult Abra and the Capulets — ‘To be or not to be?’, he taunted, ‘Do you understand the question?’.
This appropriation clearly took the lead from Luhrmann himself who was clear in his agenda to maintain a connection to Shakespeare: claiming to make the film ‘the way Shakespeare might have if he had been a filmmaker’.[2] Employing ‘Red Curtain Cinema’[3] (a term Luhrmann coined to describe his filmmaking process) Luhrmann insists that his films create an alternate reality — a ‘heightened creative world’[4] that could exist but is not the real world. Luhrmann painstakingly creates the fictional Verona Beach from Shakespearean references — advertising and businesses appropriate Shakespearean text (Phoenix Gas implores us to ‘Add more fuel to your fire’).[5] Toby Malone notes that Luhrmann’s commitment to this possible reality is all-encompassing. The Montague boys in the opening scene shout interpolated insults — however, these throwaway lines are themselves taken from Shakespeare texts (‘Pedlar’s excrement! Kings Urinal’).[6]
The 2018 Secret Cinema event employed a similar approach — painstakingly recreating elements of the original film. The pool hall the Montagues played in was recreated as the ‘Rude Mechanicals’ with unnerving accuracy, down to the Shakespeare-inspired advertising hoardings. Attendees were rewarded for enthusiastically embracing the immersive action with invitations to the Capulet Ball, with the invitations being accurate copies of those featured in the film. The Secret Sofa pre-show carried on this commitment to accuracy with virtual Zoom backgrounds placing the actors within the appropriate sets from the film.
If Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet offers a love letter to Shakespeare, this Secret Sofa event was clearly dedicated to Baz Luhrmann. Friar John introduced a special guest who, faced with an ancient feud, saw the opportunity to tell ‘a timely tale of two star-crossed lovers’, praising the guest’s storytelling and ‘boundless colour […] and energy’. The guest was not, as suggested, a cameo of a fictionalised Shakespeare — but, more excitingly, a live appearance from Baz Luhrmann himself, introduced as ‘the architect of Verona Beach’. Ever the filmmaker, Luhrmann took the opportunity to play with technology, reciting the opening lines of Shakespeare’s prologue while effecting a low-budget fade-in using his thumb. This was filmmaking at home — the Zoom call format and low budget effects common to the Live Online Performances we have become used to in lockdown. Common with the approach of the Stratford Festival, which Ben notes has repackaged existing productions to offer relevance to a locked down world, Luhrmann placed his film within today’s society. He noted that Romeo and Juliet were ‘lovers kept apart but who did not let that stop them’, claiming this spoke to the ‘human condition’ and our capacity to connect. A low-budget thumb fade out ended this guest appearance — the actors on the call visibly excited to have had a momentary brush with celebrity. Such is the power of live streamed theatre — there are no geographical bounds. Actors in the UK can appear alongside filmmakers in Australia, while I watch in Switzerland.
The 2018 Secret Cinema event was extensively referred to throughout the Secret Sofa event — the actors called back to the family mottos created for the 2018 event and the viewers joined in, with self-identifying Montagues and Capulets trading chants of ‘Guts, Grit, Glory’ and ‘Pride, Passion, Power’ in the live chat. Benvolio and Abra reminded the viewers of the family dance — reminded that is, not introduced, with a clear assumption that the majority of viewers were revisiting having attended the 2018 Secret Cinema event. The story arc of the pre-show mirrored that of the event: a series of half-hearted truces and pledges of peace followed by public brawls — culminating, as in the 2018 event, with the final civil brawl and a boisterous dance-off shut down by Captain Prince. Live action was interspersed with photographs from the 2018 event, both the official images and those taken on disposable cameras by attendees. This was particularly prominent during a performance of Baz Luhrmann’s 1999 spoken word song ‘Wear Sunscreen’ — as Friar John, Abra and Benvolio recited the lyrics, images of the event were shown. This acted as a callback on many levels. Luhrmann’s spoken word song itself samples ‘Everybody’s Free’, a key track from the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack. ‘Wear Sunscreen’ also had a pivotal role in the 2018 event, performed on stage immediately before the film screening. The images of people together in the sunshine, enjoying a shared experience were emotional. It was a vision of a summer we’ve all had taken away this year. Closing with the Secret Cinema Romeo + Juliet post-production video, the pre-show evoked a sense of nostalgia and a longing for the world currently lost to us. But it offered hope — connection between a socially distanced audience who, thanks to technology, were connecting in this new shared experience.
Human connection was the theme of the after party — bringing together people in isolation to enjoy a couple of hours of barely-contained mayhem. Compered by Benvolio and Abra, the after party on Zoom was analogous to the Virtual Theatre Performance model, with participants live and on the Zoom call with the actors. Benvolio and Abra encouraged and facilitated audience interactions, talking directly to participants and suggesting ever more extreme forms of participation. Holding dance offs, best dressed and best ‘crib’ competitions, the effect was to create a community — a sense of shared experience. Many of the participants were partying alone, dancing in their living rooms, and the party offered a social connection missing in social distancing.
Drawing on the format of Secret Cinema events, the after party offered a series of unique experiences, including secret rooms in which participants have a privileged interaction. Using Zoom’s ‘break out room’ functionality, participants were called into rooms to experience smaller scale interactions. Friar John hosted confessionals, and Abra called Capulets into a family meeting to discuss insults to throw at Montagues. There may have been more experiences — but the ‘tell no one’ catch phrase of Secret Cinema means that interactions aren’t freely discussed. This was a Virtual Theatre Performance experience — each participant experienced the event though his or her unique viewpoint. It was also an example of how easy it is to create a believable virtual world using recognisable characters and virtual backgrounds — I confess to a momentary frisson of excitement when Benvolio sent me a private message: ‘Hey, Gemma, baby…’. It’s the same sense of suspension of disbelief you experience at a regular Secret Cinema event — all the contact points create a sense of alternate reality, Luhrmann’s ‘heightened creative world’ if you will.
Secret Sofa has announced regular Friday events up to 5 June 2020 (although the film choices remain secret). With a dedication to innovation through Secret Sofa, Secret Cinema is acting at the cutting edge of the evolution of virtual theatre. Aware of the power of nostalgia and carrying huge goodwill, Secret Cinema has a fan base that will tolerate experimentation, that are pre-conditioned by previous experiences to say ‘yes’ when an actor says ‘try this’. These are exciting times, and it will be interesting to see how far Secret Cinema can push this creation of virtual worlds.
[1] https://www.secretcinema.org/history
[2] Craig Pearce, Baz Luhrmann, and William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1996), p.i.
[3] Toby Malone, ‘Behind the Red Curtain of Verona Beach: Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet’, Shakespeare Survey 59 (1) (2012), p.398.
[4] Toby Malone, ‘Behind the Red Curtain of Verona Beach: Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet’, Shakespeare Survey 59 (1) (2012), p.398.
[5] Baz Luhrmann (Dir.) William Shakespeare’s Romeo +Juliet (1996), at 5:46, lines taken from Henry VI Part 3, 5.4.70
[6] Baz Luhrmann (Dir.) William Shakespeare’s Romeo +Juliet (1996), at 2:53, lines taken from Winter’s Tale 4.4.713 and Merry Wives of Windsor 2.3.31.
