Rebecca Frecknall is fast becoming the director with a consummate gift for turning old into new. She does so with Shakespeare’s tragedy of love across warring factions, which follows her audacious productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cabaret. This is not as radical a reconceptualisation but has its own stylistic inventions and brings a beguiling intensity in its faithfulness.
Played in modern, trendy dress that gives the opposing houses of Montague and Capulet the look of street gangs when they pull out their knives, it is a dance to the death, with some of the movement set to excerpts of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. This looks mannered at first: the opening fight scene turns suddenly into dance and bears an overly self-conscious resemblance to West Side Story.
But Frecknall’s choreography has its own premonitory logic, with actors from one scene falling to the floor and remaining prone while the next scene commences, as if foreshadowing the suicide and slaughter to come.
The idea of star-crossed lovers is also cleverly bound up in this movement, through a literal crossing: Juliet’s (Isis Hainsworth) scenes take place while Romeo (Toheeb Jimoh) is present and on stage, and vice versa. Other characters remain inert and zombie-like, which has a sinister effect – as if they are automata, governed by the play’s inescapable forces of fate.
Juliet sits on the side of the stage during Mercutio’s “Queen Mab” speech, which acquires a ghoulish quality as Mercutio (Jack Riddiford) grabs her hair while speaking of men held in the grip of love. Romeo speaks hopefully of seeing Juliet with Balthazar (Raphael Akuwudike) at the end while sitting on her tomb, and the idea of their badly twisted fate is wrapped up in these proximities.
Other key scenes are given a twist, such as the meeting on Juliet’s balcony: it starts with Romeo on a ladder, but they both climb down to meet each other, which feels modern and democratic.
Jimoh aims for breezy naturalism and speeds through some lines too quickly, but there is a sweet, innocent dynamic between him and Hainsworth. For her part, she gives Juliet a convincing teen rashness, shouting her lines like an angry child at times.
Mercutio really is the “saucy merchant” the nurse brands him to be: clownish, louche, cool, he is a dazzling presence, and almost upstages the leads. Not much is made of the latent homoeroticism between him and Romeo; there is just a brief, comic flash without any charge. The production comes fully alive in its violence, and each death feels visceral.
Less is more in Chloe Lamford’s stage design; the set is eerily empty yet swarming with gothic effects through Lee Curran’s astonishing lighting. It fills the front of the stage with shadows or glaring floodlights and the back is often swallowed up by blackness.
Performed at exactly the “two hours traffic” promised in the prologue, without an interval, it hurtles towards the end. The nurse (Jo McInnes) does not find Juliet in bed, presumed dead – we fast-forward to her parents in mourning – and Paris’s death is also cut. But there is power in this pace: the dead lovers remain alone and undiscovered, which makes the end starker and more shocking, somehow.
At the Almeida theatre, London, until 29 July
