This old Georgian theatre has had a much-needed facelift: the stage has been extended, the stalls raised and the sightlines improved. Shakespeare's play also gets a makeover in Tom Morris's production, based on an idea by Sean O'Connor, turning the lovers into institutionalised senior citizens. The result is odd and intriguing, but runs out of intellectual steam before the end.
Shakespeare's play umbilically links sexual passion and civic chaos: "These violent delights have violent ends." But, while I have no difficulty in believing that two old folk could fall headily in love, I find it hard to credit that this would lead to a murderous collision between the NHS and private wards of a very English care home. Up to the interval, the production is full of wit and charm: there is obvious humour about a hobbling Romeo telling Juliet, "With love's light wings did I o'er perch these walls," and something touching about them gently swaying to Love Is the Sweetest Thing. But the tragic second half makes little sense: even in the worst-run care home, you feel that Romeo, after smothering Tybalt with a cushion, might face a harsher penalty than expulsion and that Juliet's simulated death would raise medical eyebrows.
If any one performance justifies the experiment, it is Siân Phillips's remarkable Juliet. Like Judi Dench, she defies time and knows how to weight every syllable to communicate meaning: when she cries "Give me my Romeo" it is with the intensity of a woman enslaved by love. Michael Byrne's Romeo is a bit stolid, but there is sprightly support from Dudley Sutton as a Mercutio whose Zimmer frame cannot blunt his instinctive mischief, and from Tristan Sturrock as a drug-dispensing chaplain. But although the current vogue, following Ben Power's A Tender Thing, is for accommodating Shakespeare's text to old age, I still feel the play demands the headstrong violence of youth.
