West Yorkshire Playhouse’s new associate director, Amy Leach, delivered an imaginatively minimal, two-handed version of Kes in 2016. Stepping up to this theatre’s bigger stage, she delivers a hot and hormonal Romeo and Juliet, whose oppressive northern environment and wilful destruction of teenage dreams places Shakespeare and Barry Hines on the same wavelength.
It’s not in fair Verona so much as unfair Harehills – or some equally underprivileged district of Leeds – that Leach sets the scene, where kids barely out of school uniform film civil brawls on their mobile phones and the Capulets are proprietors of an inner-city boxing gym. You could argue that an entirely avoidable tragedy becomes even flimsier in a world equipped with social media – couldn’t she have sent him a text before faking her own death? Yet the production particularly captures the sense of futility and waste at the heart of Shakespeare’s play. It’s notable how, as the action progresses, the pillars and flyovers of Hayley Grindle’s set accrue the increasingly familiar sight of cellophane-wrapped flowers signifying pointless, premature deaths.
Leach drives home the point with an astonishing final scene that reminds you how botched, ugly and unpleasant the central couple’s demise turns out to be. Dan Parr’s Romeo chokes and wretches on the apothecary’s draught like an accidental OD; while Tessa Parr’s touchingly vulnerable and juvenile Juliet reminds you how completely the older generation have abnegated their duty of care. Pitifully, she bursts into tears like a frightened child who just wants her mother – then, perhaps remembering the one she’s got, drives the dagger home.
- At West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until 25 March. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
