Gary Owen has always loved romcoms. When Harry Met Sally? “It’s the best.” The Worst Person in the World? “Incredible!” This might surprise anyone who has seen Owen’s political plays and been hit by their searing interrogations of social injustice, demotic poetry and unsentimental power.
But the Welsh playwright has been trying to write a romcom for years, he explains, over lunch at the National Theatre with Irish director Rachel O’Riordan. The two are longtime collaborators: last year, O’Riordan revived her production of his 2015 play Iphigenia in Splott, an incendiary take on ancient Greek tragedy that was an indictment of modern-day Britain. Now, they are teaming up for Romeo and Julie, which puts a romcom-ish spin on Romeo and Juliet. The “ish” is key: Shakespeare’s tragedy would need quite a spin considering its double-suicide ending.
