"I thought this was Shakespeare": Romeo & Juliet: The Musical and Teenage Sexual Liberation in Netflix's Sex Education

Abstract

Abstract: An increasing number of contemporary Shakespearean adaptations exploit the transformative possibilities of performance to address social injustice and inequality from different perspectives and towards new directions. A timely response to the challenge of finding alternatives to target current social concerns comes from Sex Education , a British TV series created by Laurie Nunn for Netflix in 2019. This series’ engagement with Shakespeare fosters a radical and wide-ranging critique of reactionism and a fight for change in terms of teenage sexual liberation, freedom of self-expression, inclusivity, and representation of queerness and gender fluidity. In the finale of season two, a long sequence is devoted to Romeo & Juliet: The Musical , an erotic and galactic musical version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, created by a young eccentric writer of science fiction attending the school. By also taking into consideration both the production context and Netflix’s status as a streaming platform, this article explores how this parodic postmodern version of Romeo and Juliet —informed by references to queer pop culture and to contemporary movements for civil rights—becomes the ultimate realization of Sex Education ’s rallying cry against the regimes of the “normal,” through the words of a Shakespearean play that opens up possibilities of resistance for teenagers which go beyond distinctions between heteronormative and queer.