What image does Romeo and Juliet conjure for you? How high is your balcony? In Shakespeare’s play, vertical distance is a nod to the Petrarchan courtly love conventions that placed the lady on a pedestal. But, like a lot of conventions, Shakespeare calls up this one only to implode it. Instead of the male lover wooing his lady from below, Juliet speaks to herself, and in doing so reveals that she is prepared to give up her family, her world, to have Romeo: ‘Be but called my love and I’ll no longer be a Capulet.’

Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, which opened in Canberra this week, makes daring new sense of the forces dividing the lovers. Instead of utilising vertical space, the stage, comprising two platforms with a channel between them, allows isolation and connection to play out on the horizontal plane.