Romeo and Juliet on Twitter - Everyday Narrative

Twitter is all around and now it has center stage at the theater. Two weeks ago a play has launched on twitter, a sort of digital age Romeo and Juliet. It is a Royal Shakespeare Company RSC production in colaboration with Mudlark. Over five weeks five characters tweet their role through thir twitter account. You can follow and read as the event unfold on the single-blogs list.
Even though the action happens on twitter, involving the audience, there are some backup pages to tell the more contextual bit of the story. An important part is the blog at kleptojago, here the invisible Jago talks on his blog abou the events referring to the tweets of the protagonists. This is a very helpful element since the tweets are very spars.


Image taken from single-blogs/RomJul / The Romeo and Juliet play on twitter.

This is, for a number of points an interesting experiment, exploring the narrative capacity of the media probably being the most important one. Twitter is a social networking platform, based on short messages published in sequence. This provides a perfect platform for narratives. All you need are characters and a message. Well actually narratives can be a bit more complicated than that, but since most people have heard of Romeo and Juliet before an overal framework is given.
If you want Romeo and Juliet scenes are happing everyday al over the word on this platform and this new production being just one of them. You could create your own play by choosing a couple of your friends put them in a list and read as the action unfolds. And if using mobile gadgets to tweet from you even get a real location with it. A play in your town.
Surprisingly the RSC production is not using the location features. This would have been quite nice to have it unfolding in a real context. I suppose the producers were worried this would limit the range. For now it is a worldwide play with every reader imagining the events in her or his neighborhood. In this sense it is more sort of reading a book in real time.
Never before a production has followed you on the daily comute, directly come to your workplace, or entertained you as you wait for your date. The narrative gets completely entangled with your personal story and this is the truly exciting bit.
Full context on SuchTweetSurrow and read reviews on ThisIsLondon or the Guardian.



http://twitter.com/single-blogs/romjul