Lately we've had an airborne, Icelandic Romeo and Juliet and an all-boy American version for ageing pederasts. So it comes as a shock to find Peter Gill directing a traditional High Renaissance production, with nary a motor-bike or black-leather jacket in sight: it's quite refreshing, even if it doesn't solve all the play's problems.
Gill's approach is admirably direct. The pace is fast. Music is used only when required and, even if Simon Daw's design is more architectural than kinetic, its fresco-adorned central archway is highly practical.
Clearly, Gill also realises that this is a play in which love is bound up with violent death: my only reservation is that his young leads, while admirable individually, are less exciting when together, and never suggest that they are overborne by sexual passion.
Matthew Rhys is a striking Romeo. On his first entrance he is pensive, bescarved and buried in a book: "Hamlet in love", you mutter to yourself. And Rhys excellently conveys the self-absorbed quality of Romeo's unrequited passion for Rosaline.
He is also gives us all of Romeo's later hysteria: there is real "fire-eyed fury" in his fight with Tybalt, and when banished, he turns on Friar Laurence with a brutal anger. What the production fails to suggest is that he can't wait to leap into bed with Juliet.
Sian Brooke's Juliet is similarly hampered by lack of visible carnality. What she does powerfully project is a heroine possessed by death. Her pupils dilate with alarm when she learns Romeo is a Montague. But, although Gill gives Brooke a number of running entrances, as in the MacMillan ballet, he never allows her the lineaments of gratfied desire.
But, even if it's short on sex, the production has many strengths. June Watson's Scottish Nurse is a marvellous compound of peasant pragmatism and maternal fondness. David Hargreaves's Capulet is a capricious tyrant. And John Normington lends the bunglinag herbalist, Friar Laurence, an aura of spiritual goodness. It's a production that suggests that the new RSC is gradually finding its feet, but its equation of sex and death would be even stronger for an injection of hot-blooded Veronese lust.
· In repertory until October 1. Box office: 0870 609 1110.
