Lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place. Eighteen months ago the National Theatre launched an ensemble of black and white actors with a Shakespearean study of doomed love. But where Troilus and Cressida was a triumph, this Romeo and Juliet, which introduces another new company, is a muddled, mediocre affair characterised by poor verse-speaking.
The first thing this play requires is a sense of place; the two best productions I've seen (Zeffirelli's and Michael Attenborough's) were set respectively in Renaissance Verona and contemporary Sicily. But Tim Supple's modern-dress version seems, literally, all over the place. We have black Montagues and white Capulets, which is fair enough. But then we also have dark-suited mafiosi, machine-gun-toting soldiers, Latin American music and an Irish whisky-priest in Friar Laurence. I assumed we were in a composite Graham Greeneland but, although you find the odd echo of Haiti or Cuba, nothing fits politically. Robert Innes Hopkins' designs - two curved, mobile walls - do nothing to anchor the play.
If I add that the verse-speaking is often dismal, people will assume I am making a racist point; and, in a sense, I am. Why is it that the white actors speak the verse so poorly? Charlotte Randle is a good actor who has impressed in the past; but as Juliet she not only mistakes running exits and entrances for youthful impetuosity but chops the verse up into tiny, over-emphasised fragments. At one point she tells a surprised Friar Laurence, "O bid me LEAP rather than marry Paris." Was she announcing she was for the high jump? What Juliet means, of course, is that she'd rather leap from the battlements of any tower. And she is not the sole offender: even an experienced actor like Ronald Pickup as Capulet mumbles semi- coherently into his beard.
What this play needs above all is heat, passion and a death-marked eroticism; but, although the text is drenched in sun imagery, in Supple's production no one sweats. The one actor with the requisite fire is Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose fine Romeo progresses from moping courtly lover to someone spurred by untrammelled sexual desire. He is almost alone in speaking the verse with intelligent feeling but he operates in a vacuum since his Juliet is a foot-stamping Violet Elizabeth Bott and Patrick O'Kane's Mercutio is a Celtic babbler.
Pace is achieved at the expense of clarity. But the giveaway sign is the way Adrian Lee's ubiquitous music is used to signal emotion in much the same way as a Morricone score in a spaghetti Western.
The production is not a disaster, just a disappointment. But the question it urgently raises is when will Trevor Nunn, whose own productions largely sustain the National, surround himself with a directorial team capable of working to his level.
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