Surely that should be *Rodeo* and Juliet. There are three contradictory concepts at work in Sean Holmes’s boisterous staging of Shakespeare’s tale of star-crossed lovers, the most obvious of which is that it’s set for no apparent reason in the Wild West.
You’re distracted from compelling central performances – particularly Lola Shalam’s strident, standout Juliet - by all the Stetsons and six-guns, square dances and swinging saloon doors. There’s arguably scope to portray the warring Montagues and Capulets as settlers and native Americans (tricky) or feuding cowboy clans (easier), but there’s no attempt here to marry the text up with the design brief.
More plausibly but utterly confusingly, the young characters are played as London teenagers (none of the cast attempts an American accent), adrift in a sea of hormones and dangerously armed. This actually works well with Holmes’s third idea, which is to couch the first half of the play as a comedy and the second as a tragedy. Romeo and Juliet’s teenage anguish is pretty funny, after all, as is the bravado of the young men, until the violence kicks in. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
Anyway, designer Paul Wills has built a big, raw-wood barn frontage across the Globe stage, with a minstrels’ gallery above for a band dominated by banjo and steel guitar. The costumes are from the dude-ish end of the Western spectrum, all long-coated suits and hand-tooled boots for the men, immaculate bustled dresses for the women.
Only Rawaed Asde’s Romeo, in his denim jacket and jeans, looks like he might possibly have roped a steer or ridden a horse, but he also looks like he has just come home from school. Asde’s brother Roman Asde plays his sidekick Benvolio; both are newcomers, each listing one previous professional role each in the programme. Their very youthfulness plays into the narrative, with Romeo tugged hither and yon by testosterone, and retrieving one of his big love speeches from a crib sheet secreted in his back pocket.
Shalam only has a handful of credits herself but her Juliet (who is 13 in the script, remember) has an extraordinary maturity. She’s utterly in command of the nuances and inflections of Shakespeare’s verse, the slide from sly comedy into towering passion or despair. Her wry rapport with the audience as she is trundled to the stage on a mobile balcony is something to behold. Older classical actresses used to dismiss Juliet as a weak, reactive part like Desdemona in Othello: but Shalam shows how much funnier, smarter and more authentic she is than Romeo.
There are big, cartoonish performances from Michael Elcock as a raffish, flirtatious Mercutio and from Calum Callaghan as a prowlingly malevolent Tybalt. Their deaths are shocking when they come, particularly the coldness with which Romeo shoots Tybalt, using his own gun. Jamie-Rose Monk is an amusing cockney Nurse with main character syndrome.
But why does John Lightbody shout so much as Friar Lawrence and why does Joe Reynolds’ goofy Paris have a white hat the size of Texas? Why the sudden squalls of music in moments of tension? And why, why, why above all is this set in the American West but played as a story of urban mayhem?
My guess is that Holmes felt the play had been too-often staged recently - at the Globe itself, the Almeida, and in Jamie Lloyd’s recent version with Tom Holland - as a study in gang violence. Maybe he was desperately seeking new duds to dress it up in. Maybe he’s just a big John Ford or Sergio Leone fan. Shoot, I’m baffled.
Shakespeare’s Globe, until August 2; shakespearesglobe.com
