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There was a curious inevitability about Pilot Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet, even before we learn in the prologue that these star cross’d lovers will take their life. Chloe Lamford’s visually stunning set is covered in an arresting array of flowers. Coupled with spare staging, simple lines and flickering candles, it was clear from the start that this stage would end up a tomb.

A bold concept for directors Marcus Romer and Katie Posner to stake their production on, but ultimately a gamble worth taking. What could easily have become gimmicky, mawkish, distracting, became a neat framing device, never allowing the audience to forget that this would end in tragedy. Mary Rose’s Lady Capulet was a grieving mother before she spoke a line, putting the deaths in universal human terms: we were never allowed to forget that the two hours traffic of the stage would culminate in the end of this lady’s child.

Posner and Romer were lucky in Rachel Spicer’s fantastic, touchingly young Juliet; she was strong enough to wrench real grief from the well-worn story. Her capricious Juliet flitted between emotions but the sheer joy emanating from her when she found Oliver Wilson’s tender Romeo was beautifully bittersweet. Wilson himself had his moments, and did a convincing line in love-lorn, but was a little contrived in his grief, a little overwrought, perhaps. Chris Landon’s impulsive Mercutio, always ready with an innuendo and a cackle, played nicely off Bryn Holding’s earnest, loyal Benvolio, and Landon demonstrated impressive versatility in his prissy Paris, too, giving him an air of never having been denied anything. Louisa Eyo, who played both Nurse and Duke, switched from lewd to stern, from servant to prince with ease, and was impressive in both roles. Her impassive Duke was a commanding presence, and her loving, laughing Nurse was knowing without stooping to the levels of coarseness practised by the young men.

Sandy Nuttgens’s inciental music was particularly striking, offering sound effects and emotive background without overshadowing the sounds on stage. An impressively varied score, and one that underlined the drama at every turn.

Dramaturg Juliet Forster and the cast have obviously had fun with the text, wringing every possible innuendo out of it, and adding some pelvic thrusts where none are strictly necessary for good measure. Romer and Posner have done a great job with the verse, coaxing admirably clear speaking from the whole cast, and making the words sound new. This is not reverent Shakespeare, although there is clearly affection for the language, but Shakespeare played to be understood and enjoyed, even at its saddest. The audience of school children clearly enjoyed the baser humour, and I left with a sense of youth and wit and fun needlessly wasted. Some judicious cuts kept the play near enough to two hours traffic, as opposed to the self-indulgent three that seems the norm, and kept the story zipping along to its sorry conclusion.

Romeo and Juliet, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 4th March 2009.

A cunning switch in the prologue from “two hours traffic of the stage” to “three hours traffic of the stage”, stuck fear into my heart. Any messing around with the text tends to set my teeth on edge, and this was not the most auspicious start to this otherwise powerful and delicate production. The looming arches of the set effortlessly became street, feast-hall, balcony, tomb, and the red shading into white was an eerie foreshadowing of what was to come. The production was slick and polished, without losing its charm, and a talented cast clearly trusted their director and believed in what they were saying and doing.

The cast were sometimes too quiet to be heard from row P, and a restless audience of schoolchildren (I’m guessing R&J is a GCSE set text) gave them a hard time. I felt sorry for Paris (Adam Drew), whose dramatic but well-acted death drew giggles. Perhaps 14-year-olds have a hard time with pathos. I was actually moved to tears by Juliet’s (Lucy Evans) death, which a first. Her brilliant, breathless portrayal of Juliet as an occasionally petulant child made the tragedy of her death all the more poignant. The decision to have Romeo and Juliet both play very young was mostly effective, and served to make their deaths extra sad, but it did come up against some problems, most notably in the portrayal of their love. They were played so young that the supposed depth of their love was difficult to believe, but these two fine actors carried the play.

The cast had some cross-over with the Hamlet I saw a couple of weeks ago, and the improvements were remarkable, really showing the skill of Charlotte Westenra as a director. She managed to coax an intelligent and subtle performance from Jack Monaghan’s Romeo, and Catriona Cahill (who was a wooden and unengaging Gertrude) was superbly ribald as the nurse. Georgia Sams was overly hysterical as Lady Capulet, and Ed Rice as Capulet found it hard to tread the line between fond father and stern patrician, meaning that his violent outbursts were surprising for the wrong reasons, but generally speaking the cast were great. Particularly of note was James Walker’s mercurial Mercutio, well cast against Joey Batey’s gentle Benvolio (who again, was far better in this show than as Laertes). Harry Adamson was an imposingly grave Friar Laurence, and Rob Carter was a fiercely angry and impetuous Tybalt.

The play opened well, at a decent pace, and Westenra really brought out the humour. It lagged by the end of the first half, particularly as we had been warned to expect three hours-worth, but the second half was well-judged and kept the pace fast enough to maintain engagement without rushing Romeo and Juliet’s painful goodbye, Romeo’s banishment, or the final denouement. The fights were snappy and well done, not as stagey as most, er, stage fights, and choreography was frighteningly realistic. Wastenra’s interpretation was considered and intelligent. This production totally lacked a reliance on gimmicks or melodrama, and instead presented a clear, calm, and strong take on the play, while allowing the inherent tragedy to play out without obstruction.

I don’t know if it’s me, or if the Arts Theatre has just upped its game, but next year’s programme looks ace. I want to see the Henry Oguike Dance Co, Richard E Grant in ‘God of Carnage’, the Marlowe Society’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Ballet Black, ‘Gethsemane’ (yay for the NT sending its shows into East Anglia!), ‘Andromaque’ (I adore Cheek by Jowl), ‘For King and Country,’ Michael Morpurgo’s ‘Why the Whales Came’ (which is a beautiful children’s book), ‘An Inspector Calls’ (which I still love despite having the joy wrung out of it by studying it for GCSE) and very possibly the BFG. And that’s all at the Arts between now and July. Colour me impressed, actually. Hooray for local theatre, reviews of all of the above after I’ve seen them.

The production that Barrie Rutter described in the after-show talk sounded wonderful in principle, but sadly it bore little relation to the play I had just seen. An extraordinarily young-looking Juliet, (played with freshness and energy by Sarah Ridgeway) was far and away the best thing in this rather shambolic production. She was by turns sweet, pasisonate, naïve and worldy, and her love was totally convincing from first to last. Her death-scene was apallingly garbled and wasted, but I feel this had more to do with the direction than her acting. Romeo, however (Benedict Fogerty in his debut), simply couldn’t bear the weight of the part. His verse-speaking was admirably clear, but his Romeo was all wild eyes and wild hair – and little else. He was lacking in passion, and his love for Juliet was stilted and unconvincing. Rutter’s insistence on finding the rhythm of every phrase makes for very clear dialogue, but is also rather self-indulgent at times and becomes slow and heavy to listen to. This lack of pace would be more excusable if there were something exciting to look at, but the bare wooden stage of the New Vic and meagre props offered no spectacle. I have no objections to minimalist sets, but the acting must then be superlative in order to carry the audience with them and away from the empty theatre space, something this production failed to do. I was no closer to Verona than if I had attempted a flight from terminal five. The incidental musical interludes were mostly successful, making the Capulet ball into a wild romp woked – until the coutly masque became a taditional clog-dance, which was bizarre to say the least. I know Rutter likes to incorporate traditional Northern elements into all his performances, but as with any additions to Shakespeare, it must be justified, and this exuberantly noisy dance, although exhilerating and fun in itself, did not sit well alongside the more traditional elements of this production. What should have been an extraordinarily poignant moment of a jolly wedding march entering Juliet’s chamber to find her dead was spoiled by miss-timed bells and a general lack of gravitas. Furthermore, I do not find brass intruments as intrinsically amusing as the cast and director appeared to.

Juliet’s last speech was given well, but again failed to convery much tragedy – most of the pathos of the scene came from the fact that Ridgeway looks so young rather than what she said or did. The Nurse (Sue McCormick) seemed not to have understood any of the subtleties of her speech, her double-entendres may as well have been singles for all apparent word-play, which made her come across as merely inappropriate not amusing and ribald. The other servants provided much more humour, particularly a spectacularly camp and long-suffering Peter (Thomas Dyer Blake) who made the most of a small role.

The main problem with this production was that there was little variation. The comic interludes had less impact because they were not accompanied by equally high-octane tragic scenes. All of the (many!) deaths were thrown-away, Mercutio’s epic curse ‘a plague on both your houses’ might as well have been asking for a pint and he did not appear to be in any pain from his fatal stab-wound. The inability to feel pain was a common problem, Romeo’s poisoned death, Juliet’s stabbing of herself, Tybalt’s murder, Paris’s murder, they all passed away with barely a murmer. I am not asking for buckets of blood and realistic screams, but such momentous scenes in the play were thrown away and failed to tug the heartstrings at all. There was little evidence of emotional pain in the play either – Lady Montague (Kate-Lynne Hocking) was convincingly distraught at Romeo’s banishment, but Lady Capulet’s (Lisa Howard) grief at finding her only child dead on her wedding day managed to be both mechanical and melodramatic. Barrie Rutter’s Capulet was big of gesture and voice, but sadly small of emotional range. Romeo’s pain at the news of Juliet’s death was unconvincing and wooden. Once again, the only actor with any emotional depth was Sarah Ridgeway, whose horror at the thought of being forced to marry County Paris was palpable, her defience of her father was stirring and did not descend into petulent teenager territory, and her grief at Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment was utterly captivating. It is a mark of desperation, perhaps, on the part of a director who is emphatically against ‘naturalism’ onstage that Romeo and Juliet begin the second half stark naked (apart from Juliet’s tasteful g-string) in a bid to engage the audience’s attention. Sadly for the actors, getting naked in front of an audience of school children is a bad idea, but the fact that the audience remained restless throughout the second half is a good way of judging how well -or, in this case, badly- the play worked. What began as an exuberant and lively romp failed to attain tragedy at any point, and teetered between farce and melodrama.