London, Apr 12 (ANI): Six actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company will present 'Romeo and Juliet' in real time via the micro-blogging site Twitter.
Starting this morning for the next five weeks, the cast will perform the Bard's romance in real time.
The audience will discover the love story through a stream of postings 140 characters or less, relayed to their computers from the actors' mobile phones.
Michael Boyd, RSC artistic director, believes mobile phones "don't need to be the Antichrist for theatre".
The RSC's aim was always "to bring actors and audiences closer together", he said.
"We look forward to seeing how people engage with this new way of playing," Times Online quoted Boyd as saying.
The agonisingly named 'Such Tweet Sorrow', is a co-production with Mudlark, which produces entertainment on mobile phones, TV and the Internet, with funding from 4iP, Channel 4's digital investment fund.
The auditions for the play were "virtual".
Charles Hunter, from Mudlark, said actors were e-mailed a one-page character brief, a two-page scene broken down minute-by-minute, and a Twitter identity.
They wanted performers who could improvise the right tone within a structured storyline and bring the outside world into the story, just as a real person would.
Three of the cast are fresh from Neil Bartlett's touring production of Romeo and Juliet for the RSC.
Two others have been in other plays with the company.
Roxana Silbert, the RSC associate director who is directing 'Such Tweet Sorrow', noted that it was a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's play and "was not very reverential".
The original dialogue is lost to more contemporary language so there will be no posts like "@romeoM: R,R, wr4 rT thou R?"
Actors will improvise around a prepared story "grid" to ensure key plot developments happen at the right time, a they aim to make it immediate, convincing and involving.
The audience will be able to post their own thoughts on the characters' Twitter feeds and possibly become sounding boards for their dilemmas.
Because most of the characters are teenagers it is natural they should vent frustration at "feeling misunderstood, being kept in by their parents and needing to make themselves heard", said Silbert.
Charlotte Wakefield, 19, who plays Juliet and has 1,000 Twitter followers in real life, will modify her style.
"I'm nearly 20 so I would type in a more sophisticated way, but a 15-year-old in 2010 will use a lot of text speak," she said.
Hunter said: "If you see a good production in the theatre you come away feeling moved. I don't know what the emotional engagement with Twitter will be. I am hoping it will be quite rofound." (ANI)
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