How do you tell a story to an audience who already intimately know the ending? As a teenager, Rebecca Frecknall remembers watching Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet with her sister. They both knew the grim fate rocketing towards its young star-cross’d lovers, but as Claire Danes reached for the gun, Frecknall’s sister let out an involuntary, “Oh no!” “Even though she knew it was going to happen,” Frecknall says with a soft smile, “she managed to get to a place where it still took her by surprise.”
It is this sort of stomach lurch that Frecknall is seeking as she directs Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy at London’s Almeida theatre this summer, starring Toheeb Jimoh and Isis Hainsworth. “I’m interested in the forward momentum of it,” Frecknall says during a lunch break in rehearsals, sitting next to a pile of recently snuffed-out candles that the stage managers have been testing, “how it just rolls down a hill towards its doom. But that’s also the challenge of this play. You’re always in conversation with the ending.”
