In a rehearsal room in Beijing, the Montagues and Capulets — the two feuding families in the play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare — no longer speak in Verona's streets. Instead, they converse across a split arena of steel, light, and ideological fault lines, while the audience is asked to choose a side before the first line is spoken.
It is a bold venture for Beijing People's Art Theatre, which has spent more than 70 years testing how the Western canon might sound in Chinese theatrical language.
From Hamlet to Coriolanus, Shakespeare has long been a recurring presence in its repertoire. But Romeo and Juliet — arguably the playwright's most ubiquitous tragedy — now arrives not on a grand proscenium stage, but in the intimate, experimental setting of the theater.
For the theater's president Feng Yuanzheng, the production represents less a safe revival than a generational handover. "I could feel the ambition and urgency of the young artists when they brought the script in," he says. "They are trying to confront something very old with something very alive."
That confrontation is not merely textual. It is structural.
Directed by Wei Jiacheng — in his first independent small-theater production — the play is built around a radical rearrangement of audience and space. The stage is physically divided into two opposing territories, Montague and Capulet, while spectators are seated on either side and assigned allegiance through ticketing. What emerges is less a neutral viewing experience than an enforced proximity to conflict.
"We are trying to make a 400-year-old text speak to a present that is fragmented, loud, and contradictory," Wei says. Shakespeare's verse, in this interpretation, is not abandoned but stratified. Sections of Zhu Shenghao's celebrated Chinese translation are preserved in their lyrical register, while connective tissue is rewritten in contemporary speech.
"When poetry appears, it should feel elevated," Wei says. "When life appears, it should feel immediate and harsh."
The production continues Beijing People's Art Theatre's long-standing vision of theatrical experimentation.
As Feng puts it, avant-garde theater should not obscure meaning in abstraction. "It is not about making things incomprehensible," he notes. "It is about clarity of intention — what we are saying about the world we live in."
That world, in this staging of Romeo and Juliet, is rendered as both fractured and overdetermined. The production leans into a stylistic contrast between classical and modern elements: Capulet authority is expressed through the structural grandeur of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, while the Montagues move through sonic textures of hip-hop, electronic music and street rhythm. Costumes are modular — each performer carries a dual identity layered beneath outer garments that can be shed or reconfigured mid-performance.
Young actors each take on multiple roles, shifting identities through rapid spatial and prop-based transitions, turning the stage into a mechanism of continuous redefinition.
At the emotional core of the production are its two young leads: Fang Yangfei and Wu Yuchenning. For both, the production is a defining early-career moment.
"When love disappears, it feels like a part of ourselves dies with it," Wu says. "Maybe that lost part is everyone's inner Romeo and Juliet."
Her interpretation aligns with the production's central question: in an age that prizes rational calculation and self-optimization, what space remains for reckless, unmeasured devotion? The staging does not romanticize the outcome of such love — it ends, as Shakespeare insists, in death — but it insists on its necessity as emotional truth.
"The story is about hatred without end and love as a possible ending," Wu adds. "We wanted to show a kind of first love that is awkward, intense, and even naive — but completely sincere."
Director Wei describes the production as a "game of seriousness": audiences are invited into a structured antagonism, yet also encouraged to experience playfulness within it. The set is dark and industrial, but punctuated by moments of unexpected lyricism — small openings where, as he puts it, "something like sunlight might briefly enter".
The production opens on July 11 with shows running until July 27 at the small theater of the Beijing International Theatrical Center.
