The following prompts are drawn from imitating the dog’s marketing materials and project notes for Remember Romeo. They will be developed with direct quotes from the creative team as the production comes together. Each prompt is followed by some starter questions for classroom discussion.

‘Remember Romeo is an ode to the shattering experience of first love, and of last love. Shakespeare’s classic is a story held in all of our hearts, tenderly revisited by […] imitating the dog.’

From the Remember Romeo marketing materials

• Can you think of a memory that matters a great deal to you but that you find difficult to fully trust? What makes you uncertain about it?
• The project notes suggest that memory can both save us and undo us. What do you think this means? Can you think of examples from Romeo and Juliet where holding onto something (a grudge, a name, an identity) could be harmful?
• The Woman in the production can recall lines from Romeo and Juliet even when she cannot remember who the man in front of her is. What does it suggest about the relationship between language, story, and identity?
• How might you represent the experience of memory loss on stage? What theatrical choices would you make?

‘The 1950s setting of the recreated TV drama evokes a country wrestling with austerity, clashing subcultures, and a generation beginning to rebel against post-war conformity. The contemporary story takes place in a Britain again struggling with austerity, identity, and political uncertainty. The two eras reflect and refract each other: two nations, half a century apart, haunted by their own ghosts.’

From imitating the dog’s project notes for Remember Romeo

• Can you identify any parallels between Britain in the 1950s and Britain today? What similarities and differences stand out to you?
• In the production’s TV version, Teddy Boy gang culture stands in for the Montague-Capulet feud. What is it about the Teddy Boy world that maps onto Shakespeare’s story? What does the substitution change or lose?
• Does it matter where and when a Shakespeare play is set? What can a production gain by relocating the story to a specific time and place?
• The project notes describe the two eras as ‘haunted by their own ghosts’. What does this mean? In what sense is the contemporary Britain of the play haunted?

‘imitating the dog will create a new one-hour lost TV film, shot with a 1950s aesthetic: monochrome grit, dance halls, juvenile gangs, early rock and roll. As the couple narrate, reenact, and rewrite this fictional TV drama, the past becomes porous and the flat becomes a site of haunting. Shakespeare’s story and their own entwine so completely that one begins to mirror, then dictate, the other.’

From imitating the dog’s project notes for Remember Romeo

• The production invents a ‘lost’ TV film. What does the word ‘lost’ add? Why is a lost or forgotten version of Romeo and Juliet a more interesting starting point than a surviving one?
• What does it mean for the past to become ‘porous’? What images or metaphors for this idea can you think of?
• The notes suggest that the story of Romeo and Juliet eventually begins to ‘dictate’ the real lives of the two characters. Can you think of moments in the play itself where characters seem to be trapped inside a story they cannot escape?
• If you were making your own theatre piece about an important story from the past, how would you bring it back to life? What form would you choose, and why?

‘What do we hold onto when everything else fades? And what do we lose by holding on?’

From imitating the dog’s project notes for Remember Romeo

• These are the central questions the production sets out to explore. What is your initial answer to each of them?
• Which characters in Romeo and Juliet could be said to hold on to something that ultimately destroys them?
• The Man in the production has come to resolve something left unfinished fifty years ago. The Woman has written him a letter she cannot remember writing. Who holds the greater power in this reunion, and why?
• Director Andrew Quick has said that imitating the dog’s work is often about ‘a life unravelling in the moment of death, where ghosts might exist’. How does this description fit Remember Romeo? In what sense are the characters in this production ghosts?