When Shakespeare’s star-crossed tragedy was at Manchester’s Royal Exchange last year, Romeo’s poison was pushed by a pair of dealers sinisterly wheeling around on bikes. Even more stage traffic can be found in Lucy Cuthbertson’s new production at the Globe, part of its Playing Shakespeare initiative for younger audiences, as three freestyling cyclists nimbly navigate the action. After some stunts in the graffiti-splashed courtyard, they continually stalk the characters. There are crowd-pleasing wheelies and bunny hops but the trio are seriously menacing, even interrupting the balcony scene, leading Juliet (Felixe Forde) to duck for cover while Romeo (Hayden Mampasi) hides behind a pillar.
Cuthbertson directs her own shrewd abridgement of the text, which runs at 90 minutes without interval at a pace to match the tracksuited actors. This is a thrilling, fiery-footed staging that cuts speeches reinforcing what we know (including Act 2’s prologue), retains Shakespeare’s imagery yet removes associated lines of embellishment, and bins some of the Friar’s fussier speeches. Most powerfully, as the Friar is outlining the poison plan, Cuthbertson hurtles ahead to show Juliet following his instructions and the discovery of her body.
