Romeo and his companions almost immediately encounter Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, who challenges Romeo. Their families are enmeshed in a feud, but the moment they meet-when Romeo and his friends attend a party at Juliet’s house in disguise-the two fall in love and quickly decide that they want to be married.A friar secretly marries them, hoping to end the feud. Entire Play The prologue of Romeo and Juliet calls the title characters “star-crossed lovers”-and the stars do seem to conspire against these young lovers.Romeo is a Montague, and Juliet a Capulet.Romeo and Juliet's love will be born from a sterile and inhospitable womb, will be suppressed as a sacrilegious rebellion, and will die an early death, but not before indelibly infusing our hearts with an irresistible desire for change. A place where, as death encroaches, the space available for love shrinks. An unforgiving world where paternal love is synonymous with violence. An uncompromising social system that defines not only our position but also our identity. The production highlights Shakespeare's unrelentingly harsh world, mirroring the more dystopian aspects of our own era. Love and spirituality are their way out of a decaying society that arranges religious festivals, debauched revels and deaths with equal ease,” notes the director. When they meet, the lyricism of the encounter creates a haven that is maintained until the end. “Romeo and Juliet construct their own world of poetry and fantasy and pursue love as an escape from an enmity can last for centuries. By setting the action in a space that begins as a place of pleasure and ends as a mass grave, the director illuminates both these divergent trajectories in Shakespeare's work: on the one hand the rot and the decay of a dissolute society that is sinking into the mire, dragging with it everything that pure and beautiful, and on the other, the unstoppable drive of love that moves towards the light. The dramatic love story of Romeo and Juliet, two young people from Verona who dare to love each other despite the fatal enmity that divides their powerful families, is based on an explosive mix of opposites.

On the one hand poetry, light and love, and on the other, profanity, darkness and hate. On the one hand, life-giving passion and on the other, brutal violence. William Shakespeare's matchless poetic masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet, comes to the National Theatre of Greece's Main Stage in an inspired production by Dimitris Karantzas. Love as the only countervailing force to the absurdity of a strange, violent, spiritually arid age that is disturbingly familiar to us today. Love as redemption from a world doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Love as something that springs forth from amidst death and dares to bloom in ugliness.

Romeo Juliet by William Shakespeare