It is not often that a celluloid superhero transforms into a tragic hero before our eyes. Tom Holland navigates the transition from Marvel’s Spider-Man to Shakespeare’s Romeo smoothly, his wan, sinewy lover instantly at home on stage (in spite of the distracting audience whoop when he gets there).
Francesca Amewudah-Rivers brings her own spiky charisma as Juliet, all the more heroic given the backdrop of social media racial abuse she has received. Holland and Amewudah-Rivers are perfectly cast, wired with an awkwardly cool teen energy, she a mix of innocence and streetwise steel, he jittering with sweaty-palmed earnestness.
The chemistry is most definitely there, even if it feels deliberately restrained in Jamie Lloyd’s turbo-stylised production, which comes with all his theatrical signature marks: alluring visuals, dark glamour and a tonne of atmosphere.
But it seems, at times, like a deconstructed Romeo and Juliet, refusing to give in to the ardour of the text, and sometimes caging it in. There is moody whispering into microphones and muffled sotto voce which brings languorous intimacy but also stasis. Actors speak their lines – in a line – at the audience, a recurring tic in Lloyd’s work, now more insistently puzzling in its distancing, anti-dramatic effects, and too stilted to let loose the play’s passion. When scenes are traditionally acted out, they are tremendous – immaculately performed and full of feeling. We ache for them to continue.
A screen magnifies faces and moods, just as in Lloyd’s recent production of Sunset Boulevard, with roving cameras capturing black-and-white shots across the stage. The cameras, again, follow characters beyond the boards, outside and into the depths of the building, all the wires and workings on show. The Capulets’ ball, for instance, takes place in the champagne bar in the foyer. It is all very clever, but to what end?
And where the screen in Sunset Boulevard seemed to gesture towards the original film, it does not have a meaningful underpinning here. So many of the techniques are replicated from that show, in fact, including the shock of the blood-letting, that they carry a hint of a formula at work.
Running alongside these frustrations though, there is clear virtuoso brilliance. Every actor excels at verse speaking, some delivering their lines in MLE. The Queen Mab speech by Mercutio (Joshua-Alexander Williams, excellent) is quietly delivered and all the more creepy for it. Freema Agyeman’s cockney nurse is a highlight, bringing so much loose comedy that she threatens to disrupt Lloyd’s directorial restraint. And the balcony scene sees Romeo and Juliet sitting on the edge of the stage, their love fizzing in the electric stillness around them.
This Verona is a dark, subterranean, man’s world: Juliet and her nurse are the only two female characters, albeit both strong and unafraid. Juliet’s father, (Tomiwa Edun) is an unyielding patriarch, her mother is absent, leaving Juliet all the more stranded.
The production excels in its presentation of gang culture too, full of contained alarm and menace. There is a fantastic, industrial look to Soutra Gilmour’s set; a screen flashes up the year, 1597, but we could be in post-apocalyptic Blade Runner territory, or a smoky Sin City. The set’s depths of black looks like a manifestation of the deathly fate that awaits the lovers while the edge of the stage is red – the play’s violent deaths visually foretold.
Michael “Mikey J” Asante’s electro compositions and Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design bring deep thrumming notes, akin to a heartbeat, as if the sound itself were a living being. Jon Clark’s lighting design captures a sense of violence without showing any. The modern dress adheres to a black-and-white colour code, just as in Sunset Boulevard, so that when the blood appears, it is a shock.
The deliberate underplaying of emotion ultimately leeches the play of its tragedy, with an end that leaves you in dry-eyed admiration. But there is much to be held by and much to admire in this reconceptualisation – one that favours coolness in place of Shakespeare’s heat.
Romeo and Juliet is at the Duke of York’s theatre, London, until 3 August
