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Romeo and Juliet review and star rating: ★★★★
Following Tom Holland’s vulnerable, impressionable Romeo in Jamie Lloyd’s 2024 adaptation, could there be another truly fresh take?
Yes, according to directorial powerhouse Robert Icke, who delivers a technically cool, youthfully exuberant production that comes with a shocking twist.
His Romeo & Juliet celebrates the lives of these star-crossed lovers rather than focusing obsessively on their much-reported deaths. Following recent megawatt productions including Ian McKellen’s Player Kings, Andrew Scott’s Hamlet and Mark Strong and Lesley Manville’s Oedipus, here Icke delivers the kind of expansive, genre-busting work that made him the youngest director to win an Olivier Award in 2015 (for Oresteia at the Almeida).
This Romeo & Juliet goes beyond the Bard – but won’t annoy purists
He wants us to focus on youth: its hot-headedness as well as the singular joy of falling in love as a teenager. To get us there, this Romeo & Juliet is no stickler for the rules. Icke’s whimsical adaptation features dream sequences allowing for fleeting but indulgent trips to imagined realities that don’t exist in the Bard’s text.
How are they? Sadie Sink, who is 23, of Netflix’s Stranger Things, is arresting – her anxious, stress-riddled Juliet is particularly compelling, especially during her monologues. Noah Jupe, the 21-year-old who recently starred with Paul Mescal in Hamnet, is capable but less commanding opposite her as Romeo.
It isn’t just Jupe and Sink who bring Gen Z into the building – Hilegard Bechtler’s minimalistic set, featuring rustic eggshell backdrops, metal sheeting and a very prominent bed feels definitively cool.
Sound design by Giles Thomas ensures the whir of an electronic soundtrack rarely turns off, which sounds like over production but is just plainly effective in sustaining tension.
Shout-outs must go to Kasper Hilton-Hille’s hilarious, queer-coded Mercutio and Clare Perkins’ thigh-slapping nurse, two totems of the show’s brilliant comedic sensibility that helps ensure this adaptation is an accessible experience for those who struggle with the language. It’s an engulfing, multi-sensory experience, always colourful and ever-changing, like those public art exhibitions at Tottenham Court Road with added good acting.
It’s solid stuff, but pales by comparison to the finale, which dares to rethink everything you know. Who on earth would rethink the finale of Romeo and Juliet? Robert Icke, a man who has a good enough grasp of subtlety to know when to come out all guns blazing. It’s a risk, and blimey, every hair on both of my arms stood up.
It reminded me of Russell T Davies’ stance on It’s A Sin, his televisual homage to the victims of the AIDS epidemic, in that he wanted to celebrate their lives, their joy. In doing so without turning off the Shakespeare purists, what Icke has done here is quietly radical.
Romeo & Juliet plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 20 June
#optimistic #quietly #radical