Rebecca Frecknall has again gone to the heart of the matter. The director, who recently stripped back Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, has now staged Shakespeare’s most famous love story as an unsparing tragedy. No healing at the end; vibrancy throughout. Two beacons at the centre.
As Romeo and Juliet, Toheeb Jimoh and Isis Hainsworth are radiant and desperate. Out of control, not always lucid, compulsively drawn together. They are the magnetic centre but they are not the whole story. This is an evening of speed and secrets in the half light. Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech – brilliantly delivered by Jack Riddiford, irradiates the evening. Riddiford – writhing, taunting, cajoling, enticing – is the quintessence of a dangerous friend, himself half hobgoblin: his description of hazelnut carriages shook amazed laughter from the press night audience. Dream tangles with the action, takes away certainties. I have never before realised how many characters don’t know the time of day. It is not only that the lovers ask whether they are woken by nightingale or lark. Juliet’s father (an explosively bullying Jamie Ballard) gets in a dither, first about what day of the week it is and then about the hour. He concludes with a lovely muddle: “It is so very late that we/ May call it early by and by.”
