Salute to older love

"PLEASE don’t go down the road of euthanasia,” groans actor Forbes Masson who is preparing for a world debut in Newcastle for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s updating of Romeo And Juliet which casts the famous lovers as an elderly couple discussing a death pact.

Since the project was suggested to playwright Ben Power in 2005, with an opening date at Northern Stage, Newcastle, of October 29-November 7, the media has been full of debates concerning the right to die for the disabled and the elderly with terminal illnesses.

Masson and award-winning actress Kathryn Hunter are the couple and the actor says: “Ben Power is like a young genius with the company Headlong who are having tremendous success. He’s adapted Romeo and Juliet and it’s a touching play about old people which has been reinvented as a twohander.

It’s more than euthanasia, ultimately it may be that which is focused on, but it is really about enduring love.

“It is so bizarre that there was nothing four years ago about this media bandwagon and it’s been rather spooky in rehearsal to pick up the paper and on the front page was this thing about a public vote on people being allowed to end their lives.

“So it is timely, but Romeo and Juliet die in the end... but that’s young people who do the suicide. My father had alzheimer’s and my mother died suddenly but I was aware of his decline and this whole thing is a hot potato.

We had to deal with the fact that it’s all blown up at the moment. This is a play about a couple who are still in love in old age and about what that means,” says 46-year-old Masson, who will be playing a man in his Seventies.

He predicts that the play will be one of the events of the season and A Tender Thing shouldn’t be regarded as an exploitative project.

Kathryn Hunter says that the chance to work with Ben Power was the first draw and then found the piece he’d written “had a huge heart”.

“This idea that passion can persist into old age was appealing and then the subject of euthanasia came out in the workshops we did. This seems to be an even bigger debate because we seem to have more control scientifically when we make choices, but what is the right choice? This can be about whether it’s genetic engineering or modified food and our culture has to decided what are our boundaries.

“But there is a love story and Forbes and I are playing it at about 70 years old and I like it because it’s a first that these words are being spoken by older people,” says Hunter, who likes the idea of contradicting the taboos placed on showing scenes of older people in love.

“My grandparents’ life was an enormous love story and it was beautiful. In fact, A Tender Thing, comes from a quote in the play ‘A tender thing it is to love and it pricks like thorns’. My grandparents had this huge tenderness way into their late Seventies which I remember being struck by as a teenager. I suppose that fact that tenderness can last and love can grow is a beauty in itself,” she says.

Her own view on euthanasia is that “when it involves a terminal disease and huge amounts of pain and loss of mental function, then there is a case to be made. On the other hand, my mum suffered a stroke two years ago and cannot communicate verbally and that’s hard. She communicates with her eyes now and every now and then you hugely miss the old communication you had and you see the huge sadness in her eyes. My mum used to say ‘if ever I lose my mental faculties let me go’, but she still derives such pleasure from seeing her grandchildren so it’s difficult to assess her quality of life now. And a patient who has made that judgement earlier might later change their mind.”

Power has recently been involved in the Royal Court Theatre success Enron and says that A Tender Thing appealed to him because it was a challenge. “It was risky because you are playing with something big and important and Michael (Boyd) had this idea in his head and wanted to know if these characters could be remade for older actors. I think these are parts that people still want to play and it is the greatest and most dramatic poetry about love ever written. So it’s provocative to have a 65-year-old or 70-year-old man talking about marriage, sex and love and feeling the emotions that as visceral as the teenagers in Romeo and Juliet.”

He says that the work feels a bit more like an experiment that previous adaptations of Shakespeare.

“We’ll see what happens when we put these words in the mouth of an older actor but it already feels exciting to involve Forbes and Kathryn. It does feel like there’s an edge to it, we expect teenagers to talk in these terms and use this level of heightened emotion. To have an older man and women experiencing these things is really exciting.”

He has found that older couples are called Romeo and Juliet lovers in the Press when suicide pacts are reported and in the case of people who help a partner die and then kill themselves. “There was the recent case of an opera conductor who went to Switzerland with his wife and when you read those stories there is something immediate and dramatic happening to these people, but all we see is an old couple walking down the street,” he says.

“While the opening shows are playing in Newcastle for two weeks we’re going to be rehearsing at Northern Stage. It’s thrilling to be making this piece of history and really exciting to have made something for the RSC’s large ensemble. I’ve worked with Kathryn and Forbes before in a different context, but going to Newcastle with it means that this isn’t a little discreet part of the RSC’s work. It’s at the heart of the repertoire and the first premiere of a piece in the city.”