Performed in two hours without an interval, Rebecca Frecknall’s hectic, stripped-down production makes sense of the recklessness with which young people fight and fall in love in Shakespeare’s play.
Smooth, cocksure Romeo (Ted Lasso’s Toheeb Jimoh) and impulsive, girlish Juliet (Isis Hainsworth) barely have time to think as they are swept away by emotion and events. Scenes overlap as if the characters are seeing premonitions of bad news they are yet to receive. There’s a kind of derangement to the Verona on display here, and a thundering inevitability to the final tragedy.
True, the relentless pace means some scenes are rushed through at a gabble. This show doesn’t have the singular vision and flair of Frecknall’s most recent hits, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club and A Streetcar Named Desire – but that’s an impossibly high bar she’s set herself.
This staging feels, by contrast, like an attempt to get back to basics, notably in the convincing youthfulness of the protagonists. (The fact that Jimoh is black and Hainsworth white is irrelevant by the way, as the production is cast colourblind.)
At first, a vast concrete wall on which Shakespeare’s prologue is projected seems to hint at conceptual hijinks: then it’s pushed over to reveal a bare stage. The dynamics are very clear here, and it’s obvious the older characters have no idea what the younger ones are up to.
All the young men are armed with blades and an excess of testosterone: Jack Riddiford’s Mercutio seems almost maddened by sexual visions. Romeo is the most suave and urbane of them until knocked sideways by Juliet and then by loss. He brings a gun to his knife fight with Jyuddah Jaymes’s commanding Tybalt. The deaths here are properly horrible. The way Shakespeare uses violent terms to describe love comes across loud and clear.
Hainsworth’s Juliet sounds like a West Country lass, though neither parent shares her accent. She captures the volatility of a teenager: fidgety and awkward one minute, self-possessed the next, and capable of sudden, incandescent rage. Her relationship with Jo McInnes’s dignified Nurse is a rich and believable one and she speaks the poetry with feeling and candour. She and Jimoh suggest the characters share a fascination with each other that includes but goes beyond carnal passion.
There are moments of quiet, when the madness is suspended. Juliet, stirring to find the fugitive Romeo creeping into his clothes, utters an arch: “Wilt though be gone?” At the end, she cradles his corpse and tenderly touches his hand. The show’s very last image is one of great simplicity and power.
Other aesthetic decisions are more regrettable, such as the bursts of music from Prokofiev’s ballet, accompanied by fighty dance moves. And, oh my God, the costumes… Juliet is in a brocade doublet, culottes and pop socks. Her dad’s suit jacket has been usurped by a python disguised as a sash. Romeo and all the young men seem to be wearing trousers made for shorter men, and possibly wearing them backwards.
Never mind. Frecknall still makes us see a familiar story with fresh eyes. Something this intriguing director is very, very good at.
