Writer-director team Gary Owen and Rachel O’Riordan are back after reviving their extraordinary monologue, Iphigenia in Splott, last year. Its blistering intensity and force is a hard act to follow.
This production is again set in the Cardiff community of Splott but is very different fare: a teenage love story inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, lighter and sweeter than its near namesake. The star-crossed lovers are dealing with hard-scrabble lives: Julie (Rosie Sheehy) is an aspiring astrophysicist whose working-class parents are desperate for her to get into Cambridge University. Romeo (Callum Scott Howells) is an out-of-work single father, caught between his baby and his alcoholic mother, struggling to buy nappies.
Spun as a romcom cum kitchen sink drama, there is plenty of cuteness and comic banter, along with Gavin and Stacey-style awkward encounters with each other’s parents. Hayley Grindle’s abstract set illuminates the skies that Julie seeks to study as a mobile constellation dangling above, which also references Shakespearean fate written in the stars.
The play is spotted with adoptive or surrogate mothers, with existential questions subtly asked around the nature of parenting, even if Romeo and Julie’s parents feel rather too thin as characters. Julie’s ruminations on aiming for Cambridge or sacrificing ambition to be with Romeo bring good reflections on educational aspiration as an exit from poverty and powerlessness. There are some keen scenes, such as a fierce speech by Julie’s mother on the value of underpaid care work. These bring wonderful flashes of intensity but are not quite sustained or penetrating enough to capture us completely.
What does is the chemistry between Howells, as the lovable, oafish and eminently good dad, and the always excellent Sheehy who brings great force of spirit to Julie. The few (maybe too few) scenes of distilled romance between them are charged with teen physicality and they soar.
It is immensely refreshing to see a tale of working-class love and aspiration unmediated by the presence of a middle-class “linchpin” character, as is the case with Sally Rooney’s Normal People and, before that, dramas such as Educating Rita and The Corn Is Green. Working-class lives are centred here and this play’s achievement is in making their world visible, and entirely believable.
At the National Theatre, London, until 1 April. Then at the Sherman theatre, Cardiff, 13-29 April.
