ROMEO AND JULIET. To 1 April.
Tour
ROMEO AND JULIET
by William Shakespeare.
Tour to 1 April 2006.
Runs 2hr 45min One interval.
Review: Alan Geary: 31 January at Theatre Royal Nottingham.
There are no fresh insights in this production; but there are some errors of taste.
These days, with new productions of Romeo & Juliet popping up on every street-corner, yet another needs justifying. This one, alas, doesn’t offer any fresh insights. And in a production which only comes properly alive after the interval director Bill Bryden makes a few errors of taste.
At the start, and immediately after Juliet’s feigned death, he does a lot of cutting, which is excusable. But to have Friar Lawrence, hardly the play’s moral centre, doing the prologue as well as the Prince’s epilogue is inappropriate and confusing.
Elsewhere the Prince is just a disembodied voice out of nowhere, sounding like a cross between a Cecil B de Mille Old Testament God and Donald Sinden – a close scrutiny of the programme reveals that Sir Donald is thanked for his contribution.
Some of the costumes, vaguely suggesting contemporary street gear or just plain old Shakespeareland, make the ball scene look like a bucolic revel; and here and there we get what sounds like up-market background muzak.
The frequent rhyme is spoken well; but, except for Friar Lawrence (Gerald Harper), the Nurse (Su Pollard complete with glasses and Northern accent) and Juliet (Anjali Jay), the characters, particularly in the first half, are insufficiently differentiated. Gus Gallagher, for example, doesn’t make Mercutio, potentially the gutsiest part in the play, sufficiently neurotic, so that his Queen Mab speech is thrown away.
Harper conveys his character’s world-weariness and wisdom, but also his lack of common-sense and moral staying-power; he commands the stage whenever he appears. Save for the scene where she finds Juliet supposedly dead (badly mis-timed) Pollard isn’t only comic but entirely believable.
Jay, with her big dark eyes, achieves the right combination of naïve adolescent and tragic heroine. As is routine nowadays, the hapless lovers are, rightly, played as half-children.
Wendy Morgan’s Lady Capulet is inappropriately declamatory and Simon Scott’s Capulet unconvincing when he flies into a rage with his daughter.
After the interval things improve. The acting, for instance in the death scenes, becomes more animated. Even the over-basic wooden set springs unexpectedly to life, and the fencing scenes are beautifully done.
Friar John/Sampson: Philip Bulcock.
Lady: Lucy Cudden.
Romeo: Jamie Doyle.
Paris: Gabriel Fleary.
Montague: Keiran Flynn.
Mercutio: Gus Gallagher.
Friar Lawrence: Gerald Harper.
Juliet: Anjali Jay.
Peter: Tim Lewis.
Lady Capulet: Wendy Morgan.
Nurse Su Pollard.
Lady Montague: Mary Ryder.
Capulet: Simon Scott.
Benvolio: Alex Waldman.
Tybalt: Daniel Williams.
Director: Bill Bryden.
Designer: Hayden Griffin.
Lighting: John Harris.
Music: John Tams.
Fight director: William Hobbs.
2006-02-02 01:54:25