When Jimmy Chisholm, as a Capulet, breaks into a karaoke version of George McCrae's Rock Your Baby at a back-yard barbecue, you start to wonder if director Gregory Thompson hasn't taken things too far. The blasts of 1970s disco, the flashing lights, the wall of colourful graffiti that dominates Giuseppe Di Iorio's set ... how desperate can you be to show the kids that Shakespeare's, like, really cool?
In many ways, it's not as anachronistic as it sounds. The setting is a modern-day Glasgow where the feuding Montagues and Capulets square up to each other in front of the metal railings of some godforsaken no-man's land. It worked for West Side Story and it more or less works here, not least in the forceful clarity of the Glasgow accents and the urgency of the storytelling.
Class relationships are important to Shakespeare, however, and you do wonder how Juliet came to be the only resident of the Gorbals to have a live-in nurse. It's telling that the most moving scene, a beautifully judged lament at the girl's apparent death, is the least preoccupied with keeping up the working-class pretence. With staging this focused, Shakespeare needs no assistance.
In the central story, Thompson takes his cue from Friar Laurence's observation that "they stumble that run fast". Iain Robertson, looking several years younger than his small-screen role in Sea of Souls, and Lorna Craig, looking 14 at a push, have the impetuosity of youth - earnest, wilful and incapable of seeing the bigger picture.
The pace of the production emphasises the reckless speed with which they go from first encounter to final kiss; it's as much a tragedy of rash behaviour as of warring tribes. If their haste means we don't have time to fall in love with them ourselves, their urgency draws us along, aided by Thompson's fluid elisions from scene to scene and a cast in confident control of the language.
· Until March 4. Box office: 0141 429 0022.
