Performed in two hours without an interval, Rebecca Frecknall’s hectic, stripped-down production makes sense of the recklessness with which young people fight and fall in love in Shakespeare’s play.
Smooth, cocksure Romeo (Ted Lasso’s Toheeb Jimoh) and impulsive, girlish Juliet (Isis Hainsworth) barely have time to think as they are swept away by emotion and events. Scenes overlap as if the characters are seeing premonitions of bad news they are yet to receive. There’s a kind of derangement to the Verona on display here, and a thundering inevitability to the final tragedy.
