Dominic Davies, the founder of Backyard Cinema, has an intuition for space.
Uprooting his imaginative opening of Baz Luhrmann’s rococo Romeo + Juliet from the hallowed pews of Islington’s Union Chapel, he has located a similarly sacred atmosphere in Manchester’s Albert Hall where the stained glass and organ pipes provide an apt setting for an act of communion in what was once a Wesleyan chapel.
Davies’ inspiration in nurturing Backyard from its first budding in his own North London back garden to its present state of proliferation beyond the capital, and as far afield as Liverpool and Southampton, is that, while traditional cinema affords an essentially passive appreciation of film, a screening arranged in an environment more attentive to its narrative, extending beyond the flatness of the screen, can provide the backdrop for something more akin to an act of devotion.
Northern Soul was among a select handful of journalists invited to a closed rehearsal little more than two hours before the curtain went up on Romeo + Juliet‘s Manchester premiere. Davies’ enthusiasm, evident in his rapt restlessness, seemed more than sufficient to fill the near-empty auditorium, even before the choir went through its note-perfect paces. Perhaps more impressive still was the alchemy wrought by the addition of the audience once the doors opened. From the opening bars of Young Hearts Run Free, and in response to choir leader David Balogun’s exultant “Come on, Manchester!”, the crowd was on its feet, entering wholeheartedly into the spirit of things.
Copyright: Backyard Cinema
Fittingly, the stage, prefiguring the film’s climax, is dressed as an altar, flanked by two sets of neon crucifixes whose colours shift to fit the tragedy’s changing moods. The effect is completed by the presence of Kenton Craig’s priestly narrator, declaiming Shakespeare’s iambic pentameters with all the righteous fervour of a pentecostalist preaching from the Old Testament. Between his verse and the choir’s overture, encompassing not only an ecstatic Young Hearts but a soaring take on Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good), the anticipation of what is to follow is orchestrated to a crescendo.
Four years after the exquisite miniature of Strictly Ballroom, Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet afforded the director a broader canvas and a paintbox of more opulent colours. Viewed from the vantage point of a new century, its tone, essentially one of high(er) camp Quentin Tarantino, is both quaintly of its time – all those post-DVD digital fast-forwards – and, in the playful fluidity of its approaches to gender and sexuality, somewhat ahead of it.
Davies’ development of Luhrmann’s vision, pausing at the marriage scene to afford an interval in the evening’s proceedings and to usher on the choir as a chorus, bringing the curtain down and back up, emphasises its timelessness, not only in a mash-up of Everybody’s Free with Des’Ree’s You Gotta Be that inevitably brings to mind Glee at its finest, but in an arrangement of The Wannadies’ indie-twee You & Me Song that draws cleverly on the genius of Burt Bacharach. Less expectedly, by placing it in a new context, it draws attention to those aspects of Shakespeare’s writing which continue to resonate down the centuries, not least the fretful masculinity that twitches the trigger fingers of territoriality.
If Luhrmann’s film is a beguiling surface, Davies’ production skilfully suggests the emotional depths beneath it. Its siren-like invitation is all but irresistible. The remaining Manchester dates have deservedly sold out, but September sees a further uprooting to the Concert Room of Liverpool’s St George’s Hall. Succumb, and take the plunge.
By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent
All photography, including main image, copyright Backyard Cinema
