This is interesting, the great divide in a play,

[Friedmarsbar 1]

Come on you Capulets!

Romeo and Juliet performed in Ranger and Celtic colours? Simon Hattenstone reports on a daring school project

Thursday February 8, 2007

The Guardian

Emma Grey and Riccardo Arcari in Romeo and Juliet at St Thomas Aquinas Secondary School. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

The walls are painted green, the doors are green, even the chairs are green. It doesn't take a theologian to work out that St Thomas Aquinas is a Catholic school. Indeed, at the Glasgow secondary's front door, St Thomas himself welcomes you. Well, a statue of him. "Aye, that's him," the caretaker says, "just as he was. Well, actually, he was a wee bit fatter."

St Thomas Aquinas was famous for his theory of analogy - that the concept of God and goodness could best be understood by comparison. He would doubtless approve of the school's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet played out in Rangers and Celtic colours, in a version abridged by Tom Stoppard for the Shakespeare Schools festival, in which 25,000 pupils are currently performing - the UK's biggest ever youth drama festival.

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Many members of the audience for this Romeo and Juliet won't be watching a Capulet marrying a rival Montague; they will witness a Ger falling head over heels for a Hoop. It seems crazy that in 2007 such a subject could be a source of controversy - but it is. So much so that it is regarded as too inflammatory for the production to be played out in full kit. The children will be wearing blue and green tops - there will be no flutes, no bowler hats, no football chants. Even so, today at the dress rehearsal, as soon as the two factions cross swords, or sticks, the football analogy is obvious, and the tension becomes much more relevant and real.

There is a week to go. The pupils are performing in the school hall for the first time, and things aren't going as smoothly as drama teacher Geoff Nolan had hoped. He is frothing with frustration as he takes them through his notes - there are the unlearned lines, the corpsing, and the fact that the two tragic lovers don't seem to care a sod for each other. "That was shocking," he says. "When you're on stage, you're trying to create the illusion that this is a real-life situation, and I did not believe that. If I see another rehearsal with scripts, you will send me lululala." The teenagers, aged between 14 and 17, laugh. He smiles. And harmony is restored.

The Celtic-supporting Montagues have a big M on their green tops, while the Rangers-supporting Capulets wear a big C on their blue ones. But how do their allegiances lie in real life? There's only one way to find out. Hands up who supports Celtic. Twelve hands shoot up. And Rangers? Two hands. How many of you are Catholics? The same 12 hands go up. The two Rangers fans are Protestant siblings.

Lauren Docherty, one of the Rangers-supporting Protestants, is kitted out in green. What do her parents think of her "playing" for the opposition? She looks uneasy. "They don't really know about the Celtic-Rangers thing. I've not told them." Will they be surprised when they see her in green? She grins. "Yeah!"

Emma Gray, aka Juliet, is a Celtic fan, and wasn't best pleased when she heard Juliet's clan would be Rangers supporters. But now she is relaxed. "It's not just about football - it's about every type of sectarianism in Glasgow. We're going to set an example in Romeo and Juliet of what things should be like. Maybe our mums and dads didn't get a chance when they were kids."

Shakespeare never explained the source of the dispute between the Capulets and the Montagues - as far as he was concerned, it was as irrelevant as it was destructive. This is where the football analogy works so well. The truth is that most of the children don't know why Celtic or Rangers are in their blood, nor why the clubs are umbilically linked to the two Christian religions. Andrew Higney is one of the few pupils who can provide a brief history of Irish Catholics in Scotland in relation to Celtic. He explains how the football club was formed in 1887 by a priest, Marist Brother Walfrid, with the purpose of alleviating poverty in Glasgow's East End.

The pupils compare being Celtic or Rangers fans to the Montagues and Capulets. They say their football team was predetermined rather than a matter of free choice. Rachel Harper, who plays the Nurse and is one of the few non-football fans, says: "A lot of it just comes from what your parents believe in. Lots of people don't know why they support a team - they just do it because their parents support it."

Perhaps the best way to understand the importance of football to Glasgow is through statistics. This city is the hotbed of hotbeds. There are 590,000 people living here, of whom around 100,000 are Catholic. Every other week, Celtic play at home and draw a largely Catholic crowd of 60,000.

David Christie, known to his friends as the Man-Beast because he has been shaving since he was 11, is playing Friar Lawrence. He says the religious aspect to football factionalism is as daft as the gang rivalry of Romeo and Juliet: "Most people are idiots, and don't realise that there is actually no difference between people. People are just people." As far as he is concerned, religions are there to be explored rather than fought over. "I've actually changed religion a lot of times recently," the Man-Beast says. "I'm really fickle. Today, I'm agnostic. In the past, I've been Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist - and Catholic, of course."

So has all the debate led pupils to ask their parents why they pushed them to support the team they did? Absolutely not, they say. Because religion, football and family make for a pretty potent mix, and some things are best left alone. "If all your family supported one team, and you supported another, you'd feel a bit of an outcast," Francis Carrol says. "You don't want your family to feel bad about you. You go where the family goes."

Nolan no longer supports a football team after an incident when he was growing up: "I was a Celtic fan. A friend of mine, on the night of an Old Firm match, got slashed from his ear right down his face, so that turned me off football. I don't like to say to the children in school I am a fan of a particular team because I don't think it's healthy to be encouraging that." It seems so sad that you can't be a fan of a team without it carrying the baggage of religion and hooliganism.

Nolan admits he picked up prejudices from his classmates. "Growing up in a purely Catholic education system, I remember coming home one day and saying to my mother, 'I hate all the kids at this school up here.' My mother said, 'So do you hate your grandparents?' And I said, 'No, why?' She went, 'Because I was brought up a Protestant.' So I come from a mixed marriage.'" It was his family background that opened his eyes to sectarianism. "As a teacher," he says, "it's something I've always been keen to correct in children."

Actually, the kids say, more than changing their attitude to football, this production has changed their attitude to Shakespeare. They had assumed he was a crusty bore, but not any more. "The play opened our eyes to Shakespeare because we can relate to it. It can be put in any situation, and we still understand it, even in the old text," Francis says.

As soon as I turn the tape recorder off, the pupils tell me what a happy school this is, how non-sectarian it is, how they embrace all religions and football supporters. They talk about their favourite footballers, how cool Shakespeare is, how brilliant he is in showing the lunacy of factionalism. Higney suggests that one way of breaking down barriers would be to unite just as Romeo and Juliet did. "Any city with two football clubs, should just join together," he says.

So with the help of Shakespeare and his star-cross'd lovers we've potentially solved sectarianism. Anything else to say? "Yeah," Higney says. "Come on the Celtic! Come on the Hoops!"

[blueben_d 40]

Nolan admits he picked up prejudices from his classmates

something which segregated schooling will always bring about

Great article though and a very good way to teach kids about rivalries and shakespeare at the same time

[Friedmarsbar 1]

While it is true Catholic schools do not espouse bigotry on their syllabuses,the very act of separation prolongs it. If seperate schooling were to cease the benefits would be evident.

Which political party has the guts to say this?

[*Manticore* 1,893]

Roman Catholic schools = bigot factories.

[coolk 0]

its just for the craic!

[Boabe 1]

Sounds interesting pity they decided to tone it down (minus actual football shirts and i quote "there will be no flutes, no bowler hats") would have been worth seeing if it was done while trying to present the most extremes of each side as the Montagues and Capulets.