Romeo & Juliet, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, review: more crossed wires than stars
The Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park – back for a new summer season after leading the way last year in staging outdoor shows – has the look of a construction site. There are three levels of metal scaffolding, with stairways on either side and some makeshift back-walls of plastic sheeting. Imposing though all of this is, the most eye-catching feature is a crevice centre-stage – it’s as though the ground had been rent in twain, scattering stones towards the front rows.
This being Romeo and Juliet, designer Naomi Dawson is emphasising a landscape of violent schism, drawing on a reference to a past earthquake in Verona, mentioned by the Nurse mid-prattle when discussing Juliet’s age. The ground upon which the young lovers tread in Kimberley Sykes’s fleet, interval-free production is unstable: at every slaying, there’s a loud rumble as though the character in question were being swallowed up. (The bodies don’t remain in situ; instead they lurch back up, and walk undead-style to the margins of the acting area.)
Joel MacCormack and Isabel Adomakoh Young play our recognisably modern star-crossed lovers, big-booted and with bags of attitude. A face to watch, Young’s Juliet combines ardency, exuberance and self-possession, looking more than a match for the heroine’s tyrannical father and more forceful than MacCormack’s Romeo, who’s lucid in speech but rather boy-next-door. Gone is the “two households” prologue setting the scene, while the décor creates an obstacle course. The actors keep clambering up and down the structure and striding across the barren expanse: great for calf muscles, less so for focus. And what era are we in? You have old-school sword-fighting, but then angry electronica at the Capulet ball.
Under artistic director Timothy Sheader, this theatre has made a point of cocking a snook at the reassuringly bucolic, and Sykes’s production gives us the opposite of warm, flowery, Italianate passion. But there are pitfalls in presenting Shakespeare’s play in such a stark and symbolic fashion. Firstly, having been through our own seismic upheavals, surely we’re craving an escape from overt doom? (And that applies to the choice of work itself: much as I love R&J, right now I’d happily settle for an evening with Fascinating Aida.)
More directly, this is a play in which extreme youthful passion goes hand-in-hand with impassioned societal specifics – Shakespeare was writing about forced marriage and bloody honour-codes. The wit and the context are equally rapier-sharp. Without a strong sense of the social order that impels the tragedy, the danger is that we have plenty of emoting but a diminution of intensity through a lack of fierce circumscription.
And so it proves. Bits of this I loved: in contrast to Peter Hamilton Dyer’s Friar, and his fusty discourse on the medical properties of flowers, take a bow Cavan Clarke, compellingly freewheeling as Mercutio. The final tomb scene, too, gets a blazing, pyrotechnic makeover, like all the past year’s missed barbecues rolled into one. At least this all gets us out of doors; but does the earth ever move? Not exactly.
Until July 24. Tickets: 0333 400 3562; openairtheatre.com
