One of the most appealing qualities of Rennie Harris's hip-hop version of Romeo and Juliet is that it has none of the self-conscious hipness of Shakespeare performed in modern dress, no sense of effortfully acquired street cred. The Monster Qs and the Caps who glitter and brawl through this story of "star-cross'd homeys" seem to have come straight from inner-city Philadelphia, not from drama school. And yet they also feel like unusually direct descendants of Shakespeare's original swagger-tongued and glamorous cast.
When Rome (performed by the excellent Rodney Mason) launches into his first extraordinary solo riff - declaiming fragments of Shakespearean poetry spliced with rap, and flicking lyrical, bodypop rhythms through his limbs - we see the modern equivalent of an Elizabethan teenage hero. He is foully witty, moonstruck and outrageously graceful. By the same transformation, Mercutio becomes a horny Hispanic, and Benvolio a dude whose cool is predicated on mean misogyny. As the Monster Qs prowl the streets of their US Verona - starkly staged by two sections of chicken-wire fencing - their clashes with the Caps take the form of virtuoso slanging matches and even more virtuoso dance competitions.
Puremovement push hip-hop as far as I have seen the dance go, not just in their jaw-dropping coordination of head, shoulder and hand spins, but in the elaboration and reinvention of its basic moves. This is much, much more than simply dancing to records - just as the live DJ act that accompanies them is much more artful than simply spinning vinyl.
But it is essentially the world of gang culture - its dance battles, its issues of turf, attitude, power and hierarchy - that informs this updated Romeo and Juliet. Jewels, the object of Rome's adoration, never appears on stage; she is merely the focus of his vividly acted fantasies and the catalyst for the final catastrophic fight between the two gangs. The whole sleeping potion and tomb plot is simply excised.
Without Jewels, though, and without the play's tragic central line, Rome's story loses its focus. Even though we register that his passion for Jewels is making him rethink his world, the show's hyperactive dialogue and action do not allow him proper space to convey his desire for anything different. At the end of the show, he is left with a stageful of dead bodies, proclaiming himself to be fortune's fool. But it's a statement without real emotional history. In Harris's reinvention, Romeo and Juliet is all intense background, but no story.
At Newcastle Playhouse on October 23-24. Box office: 0191-230 5151. Then tours to Manchester, Malvern, Colchester, Oxford, Preston and Sheffield.
