How do you start a marathon? Opening the RSC's Complete Works season, Nancy Meckler's production begins with a radical gesture as Montagues and Capulets surrender their weapons in an amnesty. But, although the show has a stylised consistency, it is literally bloodless and lacking the social vivacity that animated Meckler's Comedy of Errors.
Meckler's purpose is plain: to avoid gory cliche and to treat Shakespeare's love story as a communal narrative. Actors watch the action from chairs on stage. Katrina Lindsay's design is dominated by a raised wooden platform to which items are added as necessary: awkwardly so in the case of Juliet's balcony, a perpendicular cage giving the impression that she is less a domestic prisoner than a precocious gymnast.
Civic brawls are evoked through the beating of long wooden staves and by furious heel tapping. The movement, under Liz Ranken's command, is perfectly drilled. But that undermines the point of a play in which violence unpredictably erupts in the course of sultry Italian afternoons. "Now these hot days is the mad blood stirring," says Mercutio. Here you feel you are watching two stick-wielding flamenco troupes.
If Meckler's approach drains the play of much of its reckless vitality, it throws the focus on to the acting with reasonably happy results. Rupert Evans's Romeo and Morven Christie's Juliet are united in their rapid progress from callowness to maturity. Having foreseen "some vile forfeit of untimely death", Evans laughs but grows impressively into an awareness of his fate. Christie, giggling nervously when first kissed, develops into a young woman for whom sex and death are inseparable. The senior actors come off best, in the shape of Sorcha Cusack's headscarved, O'Casey-esque Nurse and Nicholas Day's hysterically autocratic Capulet. But this feels like an inflated Shared Experience production: I miss the bravura, the blood-tingling spectacle of a play that, as John Wain wrote, is "essentially a comedy that turns out tragically".
· In rep until October 14. Box office: 0870 609 1110. Classical
