KELLY Roberts and Chris Zuber are well-respected in Canberra as directors of stimulating productions and now they’re in deep rehearsals as co-producers of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, coming soon for Canberra Rep.Actor Pippin Carroll, a Canberra Critics’ Circle award winner, is cast in one of the best-known roles in the entire acting repertoire, that of Romeo. 

Carroll is joined by Annabelle Hansen as Juliet and, while they’re a tiny bit older than the characters (we know from the text that Juliet is 13, for instance), they’re bringing a youthful flair to this eternal tale of star-crossed lovers.

“Age is important,” Zuber says. “You can’t do this play without a sense of naivete and the tension between generations.”

Roberts and Zuber are both drama teachers so have it in mind to respect Shakespeare’s words and characters, but they’re not above making a few judicious cuts here and there, ones we probably won’t notice.

Like Franco Zeffirelli before them, they’ve been much influenced by the idea that the play takes place in a scorching hot summer in Verona when the blood is up, accounting for the extreme actions of the more violent characters such as Tybalt and Mercutio.

A guiding principle has been that sense of temperature and the impact heat has on people, making them act on impulse. But equally important has been the sense of “time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near”.

Pretty well everyone in the audience, Roberts and Zuber believe, will know that Romeo and Juliet are going to die and in fact the prologue gives it away before the whole thing starts, so it’s not the usual kind of dramatic tension, but rather seeing the internal workings in the action.

The Capulet family, Zuber says, is a complex group of characters in a play involving a lot more subtext than some of Shakespeare’s other works and a lot more questions.

Why, for instance, is Lady Capulet so distant as a mother? It turns out that she was a mother very much the same age as Juliet and her marriage shows husband and wife both in sympathy and at odds with each other.

As for the famous couple themselves, Juliet is old before her time and quickly perceives the danger they are in. She’s also very brave, prepared to take the sleeping potion given her by Friar Laurence, not knowing whether it could actually be a poison. 

Roberts believes that her bravery is also pushed forward by the impulses of youth – and everything is moving too fast. 

As for the friar, played by Ryan Street, Roberts and Zuber see him as honourable, trying to do good for the young lovers, but cowardly at the end of the play.

One of the things that will catch the eye of audiences is the casting of Anneka van der Velde as the normally macho Mercutio, necessitating a few pronoun changes but making the relationship between Romeo and his best mate a little bit more complex.

The unusual casting also allows for some richly comic moments and, as Roberts points out, with all the horseplay between the young men and the nurse, the early scenes have strong elements of comedy. 

Their idea of the tragedy is that it’s the opposite to Hamlet who thinks too much.

“It’s about people acting before they think,” Zuber says. 

“The prologue of the play gives a defining sense of fate, which adds to the tension and the excitement.” 

But just as Aristotle demanded, there is also “a catharsis thing” and the audience should find satisfaction in that.

Zuber has designed the set as “more or less realistic but dialled-up a bit so that it is familiar but not familiar – in a distant time and place, but recognisable.”

They’re using a lot of music and, having discovered that Richard Manning, who plays Lord Capulet, is a guitarist, they’ve included some of his original music, too.

Jenny Norberry has designed costumes, which Roberts says will have “an eye-catching contemporary feel.”

“Romeo and Juliet,” Canberra Rep Theatre, July 28 (preview) to August 13.