Telegraph
5 stars out of 5
For seldom was a staging better yet than this of Romeo and his Juliet
Dark, inventive, mercifully un-modish and yet beautifully fresh, Rebecca Frecknell’s new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy is unmissable
If there was ever a play for an urban heat wave, it is Romeo and Juliet. The febrile civic atmosphere in the streets of sunny Verona is as much a driver of the tragedy as the family conflict of Montague vs Capulet. It is often jarring to pile into a theatre on a sunny day, but it feels only too appropriate to be whisked away by this feverishly dark and heartbreaking rendering of Shakespeare’s most famous romance, at a moment when the mercury has been pushing 30°C in London for days on end.
Straight off the back of her production of A Streetcar Named Desire, director Rebecca Frecknell returns to the Almeida with another raw re-telling of a play that a large chunk of the audience will have studied at school. As in Streetcar, the vision is to strip the production back to its emotional essence, and allow the poetic language and tragic characterisation to speak for itself on a spotlit, bare stage. It is through this refreshing means – not through a clumsy imposition of a new interpretation or setting – that Frecknell confidently assures riddling Shakespearan lines are made accessible for a wide audience.
Romeo (Toheeb Jimoh) and Juliet (Isis Hainsworth) are superbly cast, projecting indefatigable sweetness against a backdrop of urban decay. While Jimoh feels more consistent, brightly smiling and introspectively spinning his lover’s metaphors, Hainsworth undergoes a more seismic transformation, shifting from giggling school irl to feminist powerhouse.
Special mention also goes to Jack Riddiford’s Mercutio: a character whose lines are often edited as a result of their eccentric, rambling humour, but here are embraced, and played with a wild, beguiling laddishness.
Scenes are broken up by a series of spectacular movement sequences (directed by Jonathan Holby), which are inspired by – and set to – the Dance of the Knights from Prokofiev’s famous balletic telling of the same tragedy. These sequences add a muscular quality to proceedings: this is no tale of genteel knights jousting, but one of people enraptured by an elemental, tragic force.
With particularly austere authority figures, and notable comic sequences edited out, this is a production characterised by darkness. But that does not mean we have a simple emotional tapestry. There is a delicacy of hand in the direction of the central love story, with our protagonists seen to more subtly warm into their love for each other than in other productions, which too easily presume the question of their love is solved by the “love at first sight”, archetype.
A novel, pulsating energy drives this production to its conclusion, but in a way that never feels reckless with the source material. It is a masterclass in how to tell Shakespeare in an orthodox way while still feeling fresh, and an unmissable show this summer.