I have lived with Romeo and Juliet twice — first in 2002, then again in 2019 — and the two productions could not be more different, yet they come from exactly the same impulse: the belief that Shakespeare does not belong in a museum.
In 2002, we created something wild. Juliette et Roméo — her name first, because this was her story as much as his. We put the Capulets and Montagues in football colours, dressed them in streetwear and sneakers, and turned the ancient feud into a modern turf war. DJ FrankFrenzy gave us a pulse of hip-hop and rap, and the whole thing had this feverish, club-like energy. Jennifer Decker and Alexis Michalik were extraordinary — raw, fearless, completely real. I wanted to prove that Shakespeare could be popular, diverse, and modern without losing a drop of its emotional power, and I think we did.
Seventeen years later, at the Théâtre National de Nice, I returned to the play — but I was a different person, and it became a different production. The 2019 Roméo et Juliette was stripped back, intimate, almost ritualistic. No DJs, no urban grit. Instead, my daughter Maïa composed original folk songs and performed them live on stage with her guitar. Having her play Juliette brought something I could never have planned — a real tenderness, a vulnerability that came from somewhere beyond acting. Shane Woodward’s Roméo matched her beautifully, and the young ensemble from ERACM brought an athletic, generous energy that made the stage feel alive.
Where the 2002 version was fire, the 2019 version was light. One was a street war, the other a folk ritual. But the heart of both was the same question I have been asking my whole career: why do human beings, who are capable of such extraordinary love, keep choosing division? The Montagues and the Capulets are not a Shakespearean invention. They are us — in every city, every community, every family that finds a reason to build a wall instead of a bridge.
These two productions sit together in my memory like two halves of the same conversation. The first was a shout. The second was a whisper. I needed both.
