When Shakespeare’s star-crossed tragedy was at Manchester’s Royal Exchange last year, Romeo’s poison was pushed by a pair of dealers sinisterly wheeling around on bikes. Even more stage traffic can be found in Lucy Cuthbertson’s new production at the Globe, part of its Playing Shakespeare initiative for younger audiences, as three freestyling cyclists nimbly navigate the action. After some stunts in the graffiti-splashed courtyard, they continually stalk the characters. There are crowd-pleasing wheelies and bunny hops but the trio are seriously menacing, even interrupting the balcony scene, leading Juliet (Felixe Forde) to duck for cover while Romeo (Hayden Mampasi) hides behind a pillar.
Cuthbertson directs her own shrewd abridgement of the text, which runs at 90 minutes without interval at a pace to match the tracksuited actors. This is a thrilling, fiery-footed staging that cuts speeches reinforcing what we know (including Act 2’s prologue), retains Shakespeare’s imagery yet removes associated lines of embellishment, and bins some of the Friar’s fussier speeches. Most powerfully, as the Friar is outlining the poison plan, Cuthbertson hurtles ahead to show Juliet following his instructions and the discovery of her body.
It all adds to the sense of head-over-heels passion and unstoppable doom, although Juliet’s “Give me my Romeo” speech proves a cut too far. These lovers are convincingly dizzy from romance but could use just a little more time to reflect on emotions that, in Mampasi and Forde’s affecting performances, are barely contained.
In a production with very modern crime scenes – police tape, bodybags, medical gloves – the play’s violent ends are squarely placed in a succession of deaths caused by the families’ feud. The prologue is divided between protesters holding a vigil for slain loved ones; this is a tragedy shared not just by the two lovers but by all those killed on stage and off, as well as their families. The garden of the Friar (Marième Diouf) is entangled with bouquets memorialising the dead.
The acute fight direction from Kev McCurdy includes brawls breaking out in some unexpected places, accompanied by the percussionists in Dave Price’s band. Rarely is the Nurse’s clash with Mercutio so explosive. Styling Juliet’s confidante (played by Miriam Grace Edwards) as an actual nurse gives a sense of medical emergency to some scenes, such as when she rushes to prevent Capulet (Gethin Alderman) from beating his daughter. Seeing her in an NHS uniform also adds believability to the Nurse’s lines about her bones and head aching.
The chief cyclist Owen Gawthorpe – a British champion professional trials rider – shows breathtaking skill at close quarters with cast and audience. There is even room for a wacky hallucination when Juliet takes the potion and finds herself amid a hellish hen party with a stripteasing Paris (Simeon Desvignes, cruel and controlling in other scenes).
It is well-performed across the board, including the physical bonding between Ashley Byam (Mercutio) and Saroja-Lily Ratnavel (Benvolio), plus Sharon Ballard as an unusually lairy Lady Capulet. The interaction with the young audience (principally over-11s) is consummately handled, with the text’s questions often posed directly to spectators. When Liam King’s Tybalt demands his rapier, some of the crowd cry out in shock. “What?” he asks them directly, as if to suggest: how else might we settle all this?
At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 13 April
