‘I want it to feel quite feral’: Rebecca Frecknall on staging Romeo and Juliet

How do you tell a story to an audience who already intimately know the ending? As a teenager, Rebecca Frecknall remembers watching Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet with her sister. They both knew the grim fate rocketing towards its young star-cross’d lovers, but as Claire Danes reached for the gun, Frecknall’s sister let out an involuntary, “Oh no!” “Even though she knew it was going to happen,” Frecknall says with a soft smile, “she managed to get to a place where it still took her by surprise.”

It is this sort of stomach lurch that Frecknall is seeking as she directs Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy at London’s Almeida theatre this summer, starring Toheeb Jimoh and Isis Hainsworth. “I’m interested in the forward momentum of it,” Frecknall says during a lunch break in rehearsals, sitting next to a pile of recently snuffed-out candles that the stage managers have been testing, “how it just rolls down a hill towards its doom. But that’s also the challenge of this play. You’re always in conversation with the ending.”

Beginnings and endings are key to the multi-Olivier-winning director’s process; her star-led revivals of classics sell out by word of mouth before reviewers can even begin to give them five stars. Two nights before we speak, her production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran, had its final night in the West End. Meanwhile, her spectacular production of Cabaret, which began with Eddie Redmayne’s shapeshifting Emcee and Jessie Buckley’s roaring Sally Bowles, is ongoing with a new cast at London’s Kit Kat Club, AKA the Playhouse theatre. It’s a show for which there was so much trust, the entire building was permanently redesigned.

In rehearsal, Frecknall works with dramaturgical bookends. “I’ll tend to have the opening and closing images,” she says between bites of a shepherd’s pie from her lunch box. “Then together, we find our way between those two points.” Her actors’ creative collaboration is inherent to her success. “It’s only them who can make you forget what’s going to happen,” she says. “It’s only them who can make you fall in love.”

Frecknall’s shows rely on leads you fall for: Cabaret’s multiple duos; Streetcar’s Stanley and Stella; Juliet and her Romeo. Passion is a big part of what has made her productions so striking in recent years, breathing new life into old classics with slick heat and heady tension. “I came to theatre through a more avant garde route,” she says. At Goldsmiths, where she was taught how to devise by building a scene in response to stimuli, it was “all postmodern and live art”. Later, a directors’ course at Lamda was the complete inverse, with the course made up entirely of classical plays with a conventional rehearsal structure. “By the time I came out of that course I’d sort of explored both ways,” she says, “so I feel the way I work is a mashup of the two.”

It was this unique style that caught the eye of Rupert Goold, the artistic director of the Almeida. She had already been an assistant director alongside him for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at Kensington Palace Gardens, which she followed with a series of stints as assistant director elsewhere. But what she wanted was her own show. Having seen her production of Williams’ Summer and Smoke – created at Lamda and revived at Southwark Playhouse – Goold asked Frecknall to remount the play at the Almeida. This was her big break: she lined the beautiful brick wall of the theatre with pianos – “It was a bold idea; it intimidated me at first” – and drew out an intoxicating performance from Ferran. The show transferred to the West End and the 2019 Olivier awards for best revival and best actress were theirs.

Most of what Frecknall consumed growing up was commercial musicals. “Being in musicals was my life purpose,” she says. Living in Cambridgeshire, she would see the touring productions, and was desperate to perform in them. Her dad, a lecturer and am-dram director, encouraged her love of the art form; he kept programmes of every show he’d ever seen and would bring them down from the loft to sift through them with her. Frecknall’s parents separated when she was five, so on the weekends she would go and sit in the corner of her dad’s rehearsals and watch. “He always reminded me how exciting it actually is,” she says fondly. “He managed to maintain a real childlike enthusiasm for the art of it.”

Her dad died two weeks into rehearsals for Cabaret. When she won another Olivier last year, she dedicated it to him, recounting how he had played the Emcee decades before as a student. “My love for that show was very tied into his love for that show,” she says now.

In her speech, she also thanked her cast who supported her through that period of grief. This gratitude to her company crops up repeatedly; it’s clear again when she talks about the challenges of making Streetcar. “We had a hard time on that show,” she sighs. “The way that company dealt with it was so impressive.” They lost their lead, Lydia Wilson, due to injury early on in the process, with Ferran stepping in last minute.

“It taught me a lot about resilience,” Frecknall says. “No one would give up or get disheartened, even on days where I was like: ‘I don’t know how to solve this.’ It was incredible to go from being completely on our knees and not knowing what was going to happen, to watching them get it to succeed.”

Her new cast are now halfway through rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet. Frecknall wants the production, set in a liminal space between period and modern dress, to feel impulsive and immediate, with the inevitability of the ending hanging over the whole show. “I want it to feel quite feral,” she says quietly, delightedly. Romeo and Juliet has been her favourite of Shakespeare’s plays, ever since she geeked out at evening classes on verse as a teenager, and this will be her first professional production of one of his works. “It’s got nothing to do with intellect,” she says of connecting with Shakespeare’s text. “It’s all heart. It makes me sad if people feel they’re not clever enough for it. But that’s not on the audience. If you don’t understand it, that’s my fault, not yours.”

For years, she has known that Jimoh was to be her Romeo. She first met him when he was 16, directing him in a youth production of Streetcar alongside Benedict Andrews’ production at the Young Vic, and she bumped into him there a year later when he was ushering. It would be several years until he soared into public consciousness playing Sam Obisanya in the TV comedy Ted Lasso, for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy. When Frecknall was putting together a lockdown cast for Nine Lessons and Carols, a devised show at the Almeida, she tracked him down. “I just loved working with him,” she says brightly. “He was brilliant, and Rupert [Goold] was really excited by him.”

Having considered directing the play for several years, she asked whether Jimoh might consider being her Romeo. “His little face lit up,” she laughs. “He said he really wanted to do a big classical play but it’s not something that had ever come his way.” Then in the search for her Juliet, Hainsworth, best known for the BBC Three horror series Red Rose, was “just magnetic”.

Frecknall’s shows may rely on the bond between two leads, but she does not believe in chemistry reads, a typical industry process of getting prospective leads to read together before being cast. “I’m not sure I trust them,” she says suspiciously. “The audition room is such a false environment, and if one person is cast and the other’s not, it creates a power imbalance that doesn’t need to be there. I just imagine people together and go on my gut.” The duo had rehearsed the balcony scene for the first time the day before we speak. “Luckily,” she nods, “I think we’re OK with these guys.”

Related: A Streetcar Named Desire review – Paul Mescal brings a fierce and dangerous energy

In her thoughtful clarity and gentle assuredness, Frecknall exudes an extraordinary sense of competence; it’s striking when you speak to someone who is so clearly very good at their job. She describes directing as “a privilege”, but her enthusiasm comes with drawbacks. “Whenever I teach or do workshops, I always say if there’s something else you feel equally fulfilled by, do that, because you’ll probably have a nicer life.”

As a director, you have to be OK with rejection, uncertainty, lack of control. “It’s a lot,” she concedes. “It requires a drive within you in order to make the positives outweigh the struggle of it. And it depends what else you want. Your art is one bit of you but it can overtake everything.” She thinks about it for a moment before heading back to the rehearsal room, where her cast are starting to arrive back from lunch: they have a ballroom scene to create. “For me, it probably has, it probably does.”

Romeo and Juliet is at the Almeida theatre, London, 6 June to 29 July.