‘Speakest thou from the heart?” Or rather: “Ai dyna iaith dy galon?” In Theatr Cymru’s bilingual tragedy, alternating between Shakespeare’s English and JT Jones’s Welsh translation, the uttering of any word acquires a particular salience. Steffan Donnelly’s finely detailed production casts the Montagues as Welsh speakers and the Capulets as not. It’s a neat dramatic conceit that in its most successful moments finds striking new fissions within the familiar stage traffic.
Isabella Colby Browne’s Juliet is often playfully petulant, complemented by Steffan Cennydd’s easy, prepossessing swagger as Romeo. Eiry Thomas’s commanding Ffrier Lorens makes an impression and Llinor ap Gwynedd’s excellent turn as the Nyrs, mostly English-speaking but with a broad Welsh accent, is imbued with a new dramatic complexity within the bilingual conceit. After Capulet strikes the Nyrs, calling her a “mumbling fool” for having uttered a Welsh sentence, all kinds of violent prejudices are bracingly exposed in a single, pithy sentence.
