Review: Giulietta

The sunrise of a sonata.


Susie Coreth’s Giulietta is a one-act play exploring the relationship between Ludwig van Beethoven and Giulietta Guicciardi, to whom he dedicated his famous Moonlight Sonata. It marks Coreth’s writing debut in St Andrews, and is going to the Edinburgh Fringe this August.

The first scene opens with an elderly Giulietta (played by the playwright herself) discussing her relationship with Beethoven to Count Moritz Coreth (Olly Lennard), fifty-odd years after the event. It provides an intriguing backdrop for the following scene, which depicts Beethoven and Giulietta’s final meeting, but proved a slow start to the play. The dialogue came across clunky in trying to imitate the speech of the time, and the static nature of the scene was saved only by Lennard’s (as Count Coreth) impeccable intuition for subtle comedy. However, the pacing improved as the action shifted to a much younger Giulietta meeting Beethoven for the final time. Euan Kerr gave an impressively nuanced performance as Beethoven, portraying equal amounts of frustration, anger and self-deprecation.

Coreth took time to warm into the role of Giulietta, but by the end achieved a poignant performance which provided a sensitive counterpoint to Kerr’s volatile Beethoven. The use of music over the two lovers’ impassioned argument elevated the emotional resonance of the scene, adding an even more touching note to Beethoven’s growing fury as he realises he is losing the two things he loves most: the woman he loves, and his music. Towards the end of the scene, the dialogue began to err on the side of repetitive and perhaps a little clichéd, but for the most part Kerr and Coreth kept up an engaging and sincere exchange.

Niall Kennedy as Count Guicciardi, Giulietta’s father, offered a much needed burst of energy as the tragedy of Giulietta and Beethoven’s relationship reached a bitter climax. His depiction of the singularly enraged father added a new dimension to the play, which had up until that point only focused on the two lovers. If anything, it left me wanting more of Giulietta’s story – how did she and Beethoven first meet? Do they ever meet again after she marries the Count?

The closing of the play, during which a defeated Beethoven sits despondently at his piano as the Moonlight Sonata plays softly in the background, felt like it came a little too soon; this was simultaneously down to feeling the characters deserved more of a story than they got, but on an artistic note also cleverly captured the heartbreak of a romance cut short.

A few anomalous directorial choices by Helen Henderson meant at times characters were obscured or faces cast in shadow, but on the whole the production moved at a swift and engaging tempo. The script could have done with a little further revision, but is nevertheless a promising indication of Coreth’s talent for writing emotional complexity and creating compelling characters across a mere 40 minutes. On the whole, a concise, if perhaps brief, exploration of one of the world’s greatest musicians, and the muse the world knows nothing about.

The Stand is not using star ratings for plays that go up as part of SAND.