I’m officially sucked in to #suchtweetsorrow. If you’re not familiar with this hashtag, it refers to the real-time, modernized, twitterized, Romeo and Juliet that’s occurring at the moment on Twitter. Here’s the premise (copied from the site)

Throughout the five weeks of this performance,  you will see and read  the “tweets” – Twitter updates which may be thoughts, messages, links or confessions – of Romeo, Juliet and four other characters .

They are being brought to your Twitter-stream by six actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Each of them has a “script” designed  by Mudlark’s writing team of Tim Wright and Bethan Marlow, under the direction of the RSC’s Roxana Silbert.

The actors will write their actual tweets themselves, using the rich backgrounds the writers have given them, along with a detailed diary that tells them where their characters are at any one moment of the adventure- what they are feeling, who they are with, who they want to talk to.

This may be as ordinary as telling us what they had for breakfast or as remarkable as announcing a deep, deep love.

It will all take place at the time (GMT) it would in real life.

To catch up, look at the Live Timeline and The Story So Far on this Such Tweet Sorrow site – also look out for events in the storyline that you can join in with and have more talk of these sad things.

I was pretty confused about why @Jess_Nurse was running the London Marathon and then I realized that the London Marathon is today, and the writers have found a way to modernize the drama between Juliet’s choice of romantic love over love for her family. @Jess_Nurse is more like a big sister than an nursemaid. Jess is very upset with Juliet because she didn’t come to support her on the race day. She’s been spending all her time with Romeo, and her brother Tybalt just found out that R and J have been sleeping together and Tybalt is furious.

Does this make Shakespeare hip for the younger set?

I don’t think so. Teenagers just don’t use Twitter (at least not like they text). On the other hand, the tweets do read more like texts so if we think of them as texts it might appeal to students. (And if they did this with Edward and Bella from Twilight–look OUT!) I think this would definitely appeal to people who already like or are interested in R and J, I’m just not convinced this is going to attract new fans–I could be wrong. Can’t wait to see. It’s been really fun to follow so far. I’ve created a new column on Tweetdeck so I can follow the characters, and I’d like to know if any teachers are following the story with their class. Warning: It’s a bit racy, but in a realistic rather than salacious way (in my opinion).

Now that I think about it…. while this may not attract teens to R and J, it might attract non-techy teachers to Twitter.