ISTD Open Close Brief 2023

For this brief, I chose to radically reimagine Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The aim of my reimagining was to challenge the traditional story and to ask the reader, what if Romeo was a girl? Drawing on the troubled queer relationships of literary icons; Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickinson. The publication explores the key themes of love, death and socially problematic desire within the context of a queer relationship between two women, highlighting the intersection between gender and sexuality and the social complications linked with same sex desire.