Romeo and Juliet has been adapted, transplanted, and reimagined more than almost any other work in the English language. This list is a curated selection, not an exhaustive survey. It is intended as a jumping-off point into alternative versions, and an exploration of ITD’s interests in adaptation, memory, ageing, and the texture of 1950s Britain across a wider range of artistic work. Not everything here is easy or comfortable, but all of it is worth your time.

Romeo and Juliet on Stage and Screen

Shakespeare’s play has never stayed still. The following adaptations show how radically it can be reshaped while retaining its emotional core, and raise useful questions about what that core actually is.

• West Side Story Music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Broadway 1957; films 1961 (dir. Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise) and 2021 (dir. Steven Spielberg). The most significant cultural transplant of the play, with rival gangs in 1950s New York replacing the feuding families and racial tension at the centre. The 2021 film is a substantial artistic achievement in its own right. Directly relevant because, like Remember Romeo, it places the story in a 1950s urban world of rival youth groups.
  
• Romeo + Juliet Dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996. Perhaps the most widely seen adaptation for a contemporary audience. Shakespeare’s language is kept intact; everything else (setting, costume, genre, aesthetic) is radically overhauled. Essential for understanding how the play’s language can survive complete visual and cultural overhaul.
  
• Romeo and Juliet Dir. Franco Zeffirelli, 1968. The most frequently screened traditional version; played by actual young actors (Olivia Hussey, Leonard Whiting) and shot in Italy with care for period detail. A useful baseline for comparison with more radical approaches.
  
• Matthew Bourne’s Romeo + Juliet New Adventures, 2019. A wordless ballet set in a contemporary institution for troubled young people. Physically inventive and emotionally devastating; entirely free of Shakespeare’s language and yet unmistakably the same story. Available to stream via the New Adventures and Sky Arts websites.
  
• Shakespeare in Love Dir. John Madden, 1998. A fictional account of Shakespeare writing the play; playful, romantic, and self-aware. Useful for thinking about the mythology surrounding the play’s origins and the way stories take on a life beyond their creator.

Further afield: Romeo and Juliet without reverence

One of the things Remember Romeo demonstrates is that Romeo and Juliet does not need to be treated as sacred or untouchable. The play has always been available to radical and even irreverent reinvention. The following examples make that point vividly, and some of them have genuinely informed the production’s approach.

• Gnomeo & Juliet Dir. Kelly Asbury, 2011. Romeo and Juliet retold with animated garden gnomes, accompanied by an Elton John soundtrack and a happy ending. Andrew Quick has cited this as a formative example: if a children’s animated film can cheerfully remake the play without treating it as canonical or untouchable, the text is genuinely available to any kind of reinvention. Worth watching with that in mind.
  
• & Juliet West End musical, 2019; Broadway, 2023. Book by David West Read; music by Max Martin. Asks the question: what if Juliet chose not to die? Gives her a different story and a different ending, using the play as a springboard to explore agency, identity, and gender. Interesting for its explicit argument that the tragedy’s conclusion is not the only possible conclusion.
  
• ‘Love Story’ Taylor Swift, 2008. One of the most widely heard pop songs of the twenty-first century draws directly on Romeo and Juliet and gives the story a happy ending. More than a billion streams. A useful discussion point: what does it mean that the version of Romeo and Juliet most familiar to many young people is one in which nobody dies?
  
• Warm Bodies Dir. Jonathan Levine, 2013. Romeo and Juliet retold as a zombie romance. Knowingly absurd, but structurally faithful to the original. Another demonstration of how the play’s bones (rival groups, forbidden love, the power of connection) survive transplantation to almost any genre.

Memory, Loss and Ageing

These works explore memory as subject, and some of them use form itself as a tool for staging what memory loss feels like from the inside. They are the most direct artistic companions to Remember Romeo.

• Krapp’s Last Tape Samuel Beckett, 1958. A one-person play: an old man sits alone and listens to recordings of his younger self, made on his birthday decades earlier. He plays and replays; he argues with the voice he no longer recognises as his own. Structurally the closest parallel to Remember Romeo, presenting an older person confronted by an archived younger version. Short (about 45 minutes), austere, and powerful. Widely available in collected editions of Beckett’s plays.
  
• Old Times Harold Pinter, 1971. Three characters, a single evening, and a past that may or may not have happened the way anyone claims. Pinter is a significant touchstone for ITD; this play is his sharpest exploration of how memory and power are entangled, with characters using the past as a weapon.
  
• The Father Florian Zeller: stage play, 2012; film dir. Christopher Hampton, 2020 (with Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman). The entire work is structured from inside the perspective of a man with dementia: room, identity, and time shift and contradict themselves as the audience inhabits his disintegrating world. The formal approach to presenting a fragmented inner reality is directly comparable to Remember Romeo’s treatment of the Woman’s experience. The film is widely available to stream.
  
• Away from Her Dir. Sarah Polley, 2006. Based on Alice Munro’s short story ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’. A woman with Alzheimer’s forgets her husband and forms an attachment to another man in her care home; he must decide whether to accept this or fight it. Good for thinking about what memory loss does to love, and about who bears its weight.
  
• 45 Years Dir. Andrew Haigh, 2015. A British film (Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay) in which a couple preparing to celebrate their forty-fifth wedding anniversary is disrupted by the surfacing of a secret from the husband’s past. About the past that lives inside a long relationship and about what happens when it resurfaces. Restrained, emotionally overwhelming.
  
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Dir. Michel Gondry, 2004. Script by Charlie Kaufman. A formally inventive film about love and the desire to erase painful memory. Two ex-lovers each undergo a procedure to delete the other from their minds, raising the question of whether we would choose to keep our most painful memories if we could.
  
• Constellations Nick Payne, 2011 (Royal Court Theatre). A short stage play in which the same conversations between a couple play out across multiple possible realities, and one character develops a degenerative neurological condition. Formally inventive and emotionally precise; available in published form.

Theatre, Film and Technology

imitating the dog’s practice of weaving live performance with projected film places it within a broader international tradition of intermedial and visual theatre. The following companies and makers are working in overlapping territory.

• Kontakthof / Kontakthof: Echoes of ’78 Pina Bausch / Tanztheater Wuppertal. Kontakthof (1978) is a seminal piece of Tanztheater concerned with desire, loneliness, and the rituals of human contact. Kontakthof: Echoes of ’78 (2024), conceived and directed by Meryl Tankard (a member of the original cast), brought nine of those original dancers back to the work as older performers, with archival footage of their 1978 performances projected during the live show. Their younger selves appeared on screen alongside them on stage. The structural parallel to Remember Romeo is striking: older performers inhabiting a work they first performed in youth, with the archived image of who they were playing beside them.
  
• Robert Lepage / Ex Machina Particularly 887 (2015), in which Lepage explores his own memory and autobiography using projection, a miniature architectural model, and live performance. Lepage is the closest international equivalent to ITD in terms of combining live theatre with film and digital imagery.
  
• Complicite / The Encounter Dir. Simon McBurney, 2015. A one-person show using binaural audio, live recording, and projection to immerse the audience inside another person’s consciousness. A work about memory, the unreliable self, and the nature of theatrical presence. Available on various streaming platforms.
  
• 1927 (Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt) A UK-based company whose productions blend live actors with precisely synchronised projected animation. A different visual aesthetic to ITD but sharing the multimedia ambition and the interest in using technology to tell stories that live performance alone cannot.

The World of the Production: 1950s and 60s Britain

The fictional TV adaptation within Remember Romeo is set in Northern England in the 1950s, where Teddy Boy gangs stand in for the feuding families of Verona. The following films were directly referenced by the creative team, or give useful context for that world and its visual texture.

• Brighton Rock Dir. John Boulting, 1948. A direct touchstone for the production’s visual and moral atmosphere: gang violence in a British seaside town, a young man (Pinkie Brown) who is as much a creature of his social world as of his own will. Black-and-white, morally ferocious, visually distinctive. A 2010 colour remake is available if that version is more accessible.
  
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Dir. Karel Reisz, 1960. Albert Finney as a young factory worker in Nottingham resisting the constraints of his world. Kitchen-sink realism at its sharpest; captures the sound and texture of working-class British youth at the moment the production is set.
  
• A Taste of Honey Dir. Tony Richardson, 1961. A Northern English young woman (Rita Tushingham) navigating desire, pregnancy, and social expectation in Salford. Shot partly on location in the streets of the North West; the landscape and atmosphere are close to the world the production inhabits.
  
• Kes Dir. Ken Loach, 1969. Shot in colour by cinematographer Chris Menges with an anti-glamorous naturalism that reads almost like documentary, Kes follows a fifteen-year-old boy in a South Yorkshire mining community with few prospects and fewer chances. Ranked 7th in the BFI’s Top 100 British films. While set in the late 1960s rather than the 1950s, the landscape it captures (Northern English working-class life, colliery towns, boys finding their own codes of dignity in a world that has decided their futures already) is directly continuous with the world of Remember Romeo’s TV version. Cited by Simon Wainwright as a reference for the production’s approach to Northern England on screen.

Music

• ‘Flip Flop and Fly’ Big Joe Turner, 1955. Heard in the production itself, as part of the title sequence of the fictional TV adaptation. A good starting point for the jump blues and early rock and roll that soundtracked Britain’s first wave of youth culture.
  
• Romeo and Juliet: ballet score Sergei Prokofiev, composed 1935. The most famous musical response to the play; ‘Dance of the Knights’ and the love theme are immediately recognisable and worth comparing with the very different soundworld of Remember Romeo.
  
• ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Dire Straits, 1980. A melancholy pop song that draws on the play’s romantic mythology to tell a very ordinary story of lost love. A good example of how the play has permeated everyday culture, and of how its emotional register (longing, loss, the wrong timing) translates into new contexts.