Here you can find resources designed around the 2019 Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production of Romeo and Juliet. Created for young people, students are able to follow along with the production online on the Globe's dedicated Romeo and Juliet microsite.
If students are new to the play, we suggest you start with these introductory Key Stage 3 Lesson Plans. If you would like to teach the play in greater detail, we recommend you use the advanced activities which can be found in the Key Stage 4 or Key Stage 5 areas.
We will be updating this section week by week, so be sure to check back for more activities soon.
Find the Week 1 blog by the assistant director of the play Natasha Rickman. In the blog, Natasha references on both the Monday and Friday entries that the cast have been working with Alison, the fight director for Romeo and Juliet. Natasha states how, ‘[each] fight has a story’, and the work that goes into understanding and creating this on the stage.
For the next task, imagine you are the fight director for Romeo and Juliet. Select one of the following fight scenes from the play to work on:
- Act 1, Scene 1
- Act 3, Scene 1
- Act 5, Scene 3
Make notes about how you would stage it by completing the following tasks:
- Understand the ‘story’ of the fight: read through the scene and make notes on each character’s reason for fighting.
- What type of fight moves do you think each character would have, based on what you know about them? Think about whether the fighting styles of the Montagues and the Capulets might be different. Are there any comparisons you can make with other famous fighting styles?
- Find the moments in the text where the actor playing each character would need to use these, and make notes on what they would need to do.
- Make notes also on the reaction required from the actor receiving the fight move. Natasha says: ‘the most important thing in stage fighting in order to make it look real to the audience’!
To vary this task, have students work in groups, with each student taking responsibility for a different character within a specific scene.