Advertising and memorialising a theatrical Shakespeare rewrite in local, national and cosmopolitan contexts: The Sherman Theatre and the National Theatre's Romeo and Julie

This chapter proposes a methodology for analysing theatre marketing and advertising by looking at a recent performance of a Welsh reworking of Romeo and Juliet, Sherman Theatre and the Royal National Theatre’s Romeo and Julie by Gary Owen. The show that had two (interconnected) strands of marketing – one functioning at a local/regional level and the other carried out with a more metropolitan/cosmopolitan audience in mind. The chapter proposes the perception of such an “ephemeral text” type (Grainge 2011:13) and epitext (Genette 1997) as the theatre programme as a mise en abyme for how a theatre production (and Shakespeare with it) is marketed and contextualised for the audience. The theatre programme is thus viewed as a mise en abyme of the cluster of advertising “texts” and creative engagement activities accompanying a production, in addition to carrying an important memorialising function.