“Fair Verona”, Shakespeare’s setting for the play is, in Kenny Miller’s design, a brutalist concrete expanse. A towering grey wall, tattered with posters, is a palimpsest of past attractions. Only one remains intact, advertising Baz Luhrmann’s film version of Romeo and Juliet. A scuzzy mattress is bunched into an angle with a staircase (it will become Juliet’s bed). A bike leans – unchained – between dark doorways, seemingly waiting to be nicked. Instead, it is flung in a fight. This is odd, since all can see that the baseball bat lying by its wheels would have made a far more effective weapon.
The place we are in is a Nowhere Land of edgy, urban chic – it semaphores to the audience: “Hey, guys, this may be, like, a kinda classic text, but it’s still, well, y’know, relevant.” There are two problems with this. We don’t talk the way Shakespeare’s characters did, so swathes of dialogue seem utterly bizarre (who puts wormwood on their dugs to wean a child?). Social hierarchies and distinctions become blurred: the Montagu and Capulet feud no longer threatens the security of the state, it’s just a couple of dysfunctional families creating a violent disturbance. Tragedy transforms into melodramatic soap opera.
Rachel O’Riordan – mounting her first production as Sherman Cymru’s new artistic director – is confronted with a contemporary director’s dilemma. Update the action so as to grab teenagers’ attention, but do not meddle with the words (beyond a few time-saving cuts) in case students in the audience are studying it for exams. Here, the compromise undermines both the updating and the original.
The strength of O’Riordan’s production lies in the clarity of its moments of emotional directness. In, for instance, the first exchange between Chris Gordon’s Romeo and the Sean O’Callaghan’s Friar Laurence: fresh, lively and poignant. Sophie Melville’s Doc Marten-ed Juliet develops from sulky, strident teen into a maturity of expression and perception that is moving to behold, particularly in the soul-shattering simplicity of her confrontation with death. While the lovers’ encounters never quite convey the tremulous mystery of true love, they do vibrantly communicate the excitement of passion’s waking.
