Romeo and Video

ROMEO & JULIET

The Duke of York’s Theatre, London, Thursday 27^th June 2024

The best production of this play I’ve ever seen was many years ago.  Six actors performing in the grounds of Sudeley Castle, the audience on blankets, snacking from picnic hampers.  The only liberties taken with the text were to facilitate the doubling-trebling-quadrupling of roles.   There was live music and singing.  There were swords and candles and lamps, oh my, and we all laughed at and cried for Mercutio, thrilled at the action, and were moved by the lovers’ inevitable fate.  It was Shakespeare, the actors, and us and our wine boxes.  It was perfection.

Radical director Jamie Lloyd also presents a stripped-back staging.  It’s 1592 in Verona, so says a projected date and a set of big letters as if the Hollywood sign had been made by Spinal Tap’s designers.  It seems back then Verona was a dark and empty space, furnished only by microphones on stands.  The show begins with Benvolio and Tybalt at two of these mics whispering dialogue to each other.  There is no movement, no violence.  It’s like two competing ASMR podcasts.  The mic stands give the impression that characters are going to launch into some blistering stand-up routine or drop a few Rat Pack numbers.  They never do, though.

The (spider) man most people have come to see, Tom Holland is Romeo in a hoodie.  He spends a lot of time sitting at the edge of the stage, down centre, but what is most annoying is, he doesn’t get to give us the full-throated performance of which he is evidently capable.  Lloyd has him recite a large proportion of his lines, deadpan and quietly.  There’s too much of this from everyone, in fact.  Emotional moments are reduced to whispering, as though Verona is a library, a big, dark empty library.

Oh, and there are on-stage camera operators, throwing huge close-ups of characters onto a massive screen.  My blood runs cold.  It was this rotten gimmick that ruined Ivo Van Hove’s Opening Night.  And so, at moments when characters should engage with each other, they’re looking at a lens.  They may not even be on stage – Actually, this sometimes works well: Capulet’s party is set in the foyer bar, which is a place more opulent than the black box staging.  Characters conspire in the theatre corridors, and the action is opened out without the burden of any scenery.  But on the whole, it keeps us at a distance.  Infuriatingly, when Lloyd lets the actors emote, we are drawn into their plight, only to be shoved away again by the next radical idea.

Holland does OK within these constraints; he’s used to screen acting, after all.  There is a scene where Romeo having been banished to Mantua (the theatre roof) receives news of Juliet’s ‘death’ and – well, it’s just embarrassing.

The violence (the murders of Mercutio and Tybalt) happens in sudden blackout, then it’s lights up and everyone has blood on their shirts and hands.  That’s quite startling, but when you have R and J, Friar Lawrence and the Nurse standing in a row behind microphones and never looking at each other, the scene may as well be an audiobook.   This facing-out puts the audience in the p.o.v. of the character being addressed, which is great, if the actors are acting.  If they’re just reciting, devoid of emotion, it pulls us out of the scene to wait for the next ‘good bit’.

The casting of Francesca Amewudah-Rivers as Juliet attracted a lot of hoo-hah from racist twats.  They remain twats.  She is excellent.  She and Holland bring youthfulness and the awkwardness of adolescence to their scenes — when they are allowed to interact.

Joshua Alexander Williams’s Mercutio delivers a chilling Queen Mab speech; Daniel Quinn Toye’s Paris, though much reduced, makes a humorous impact; Ray Sesay’s Tybalt has physical presence, despite being denied action; Michael Baldgun’s Friar is both avuncular and authoritative – but why the Apothecary is a disembodied demonic voice escapes me.

Best of the entire lot is Freema Adyeman as the Nurse.  Despite all of Lloyd’s radical ideas, Adyeman’s Nurse remains human, a living, breathing, emoting human.  Even during the cold reciting, her eyes betray her humanity, while the rest would have trouble identifying photographs with traffic lights in.

Moments of brilliance when the concept actually works, aren’t enough to save this production from being a disappointment.   The point of staging Shakespeare is that he still speaks to us over 400 years later.  Lloyd seems to be doing all he can to get in Shakespeare’s way.  And that’s a shame when this cast is brimming with underused talent.

Oh, and I can’t wait for this fad for big screens and cameras has run its course.  I want theatrical experiences at the theatre, not half-arsed cinema.

☆ ☆

They made eye-to-eye contact — but only rarely! Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers

Photo: Marc Brenner