Henry Maynard doesn’t do lukewarm theatre. As the visionary force behind Flabbergast Theatre, his productions burn with movement, masks, and mythic energy. For their latest reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, Flabbergast strips the Shakespearean romance down to its primal bones—delivering a raw, physical fever dream. We caught up with Henry to talk about tragedy, trance, and the poetry of falling hard and fast.
Flabbergast’s take on Romeo and Juliet promises to be anything but traditional. What excited you most about reimagining this particular Shakespeare play through your raw, physical style?
We feel Romeo and Juliet is like a wild party that grows wings before veering off a cliff. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking, maddening catastrophe… but how often do we see it like that?
It is one of the darkest, most moving plays ever written; it is a true, perfectly pitched tragedy. Everyone—everyone—knows the basic story of two lovers torn apart by a polarized world.
So often, when it is interpreted, we are subjected to melodrama and psychological realism. But for us, Romeo & Juliet is a great opportunity to open a tragic space. It is an ultra-violent world, upside down with hate and pain. Juliet and Romeo are foolish, simple, and transgressive in choosing love over violence.
For us, the more playful we can be—from the ritualistic fight to the flouncing clown—the more we open up the Romeo and Juliet of our dreams: a nightmare world where apothecaries, fairies, heroes, prophets, and ghosts transform.
Your productions blur the boundaries between theatre, ritual, and rebellion. What kind of emotional or sensory journey do you want the audience to take during this version of Romeo and Juliet?
I want our audiences to be moved to love, joy, ecstasy, bliss, grief, fear, and disgust. The play wakes me up when I read it, through its contradictions… I hope the audience are as moved to laughter and pain as I am by the poetry.
I am interested in the transgression and trance opportunities in the play, and instances with disgust and the profane.
Ultimately, tragedy means lamentation: the singing, dancing, and crying out of grief, pain, and rage. In order for that to happen, we have to fall in love with these two beautiful adolescents. We have to get lost in the rapture of a party in which they get so high, they have the furthest of anyone to fall.
Theatre is a healthy modern place to explore our relationship to the damage of grief and anger.
The show is described as “a fever dream of movement and emotion.” Can you walk us through how movement and choreography shape the narrative in this production?
Matej (our movement director)’s work looks at the body from the perspective of moving mechanically, from our sensation and within our imagination… We will take the audience on a journey through Shakespeare’s poetry in our bodies, which we aim to drive the characters and the audience towards an experience of the “tragic.” We think of theatre as a kind of ritualistic space that links us somehow to a mythic dream space where heroes and monsters float.
Tragedy operates through poetry, not psychological action alone, and therefore we are actively looking for the poetic expressions of the play through the body—through the physical expression of desire, passion, fire, ice, of contradiction.
Mask work and clowning are signature elements in your approach. How do they transform Shakespeare’s original text and elevate the tragedy at its core?
Shakespeare has written poetic text that sits so well in the extended forms of mask, chorus, clown, and song. How do you reach poetry? Well, we try by using the theatrical forms that touch the same mythic dimension as the drama… We are bored by the constraints of naturalism and historical realism, which English theatre is maybe a little addicted to. We want to experience something ancient and something thrillingly new through this work.
You’ve performed across the globe—how has working internationally influenced your directing style and the kind of stories Flabbergast tells?
We know that the body and the spectacle come first… We have worked a lot with practitioners from France, Italy, Poland, and Spain; our own performers have come from Lithuania, Israel, Indonesia, Poland, South Africa, Germany… Having worked through the body, with puppetry, mask, and folk singing, as well as across many languages, we have come to be interested in a kind of mythic imagination.
Maybe we are just teenagers who got stuck in our adolescence, but we want to make work that wakes us up—that challenges us to find new skills, learn new songs, crack new jokes—all the while examining the great mysteries these tragedies open us up to.
From Macbeth to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Flabbergast has a history of reinventing the Bard. What keeps you coming back to Shakespeare?
How boring to have a stuck view of what Shakespeare should be. We hear a lot of people policing Shakespeare, its meaning, and the proper approach. But the Bard is about who we are. It is about what it means to be British, English, Human—or whatever. In Flabbergast, we are interested in our shared heritages, but we would like to reimagine and reinvent what that means… not through telling, but through dancing, entrancing, singing, and weeping.
Wilton’s Music Hall has its own rich theatrical history. How does performing Romeo and Juliet in such a space shape the energy and intimacy of the show?
Wilton’s is one of the best theatres in the country for its heritage, its ghosts, its aesthetics, and architecture. It matches perfectly with our ethos of theatre, drawing on the roots of the music hall and elevated performance styles of British theatre past. We will use the space to have as much fun as we can and offer something as epic and grand as Wilton’s.
What do you hope younger audiences—or those less familiar with Shakespeare—take away from this production?
I remember studying Romeo and Juliet in school and—no offence—the teachers didn’t convey half of its depth through its academic study. The plays are meant to be experienced as the stories of love, death, ecstasy, and greed that they are.
We are proud of how teenagers respond to our work; we are as provocative as them, so they are often shocked and energized by what we permit and push ourselves to do. It means they tend to have huge amounts of fun…
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Flabbergast Theatre: Romeo and Juliet
Wilton’s Music Hall
10–21 June 2025
