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Theatre Review | Open Air Theatre | Romeo and Juliet
ROMEO AND JULIET
Open Air Theatre
CONTRARY to what you may have heard, open air theatre is no picnic. At least not for the actors, who must compete with garrulous magpies, low-flying jumbo jets, and the huff and hoorah of neighbouring rugby players for the attentions of their audience.
When the quarry is Shakespeare – and you can bet all the Pimms in Albion that it will be – these quibbles multiply exponentially, even with patched-on microphones.
Most banshees would politely decline the job. So it is a brave cast, and one that should be commended on principle, which tackles the death-marked passage of Romeo and Juliet.
Birds may heckle, but the Bard triumphs in the open airTimothy Sheader’s punchy, enjoyable production does much to alleviate their burden.
A genre-bending hodgepodge of 1950s greaseballs, Elizabethan codpieces and Latino chanteuses manages to strike a convincing, if populist, harmony.
One woman delivers a haunting song in Spanish, then pops the gum back in her mouth and resumes chewing. Flick knives and guns have replaced rapiers; and clever segues from one scene to the next have slashed the running time.
Traditionalists might curl their lips at certain filmic conceits – the jabbering crowds reduced to a balletic, “bullet-time” slow motion to pick out the star-crossed lovers; the emotive, swelling soundtrack – but you cannot uncurl all the lips all the time.
Some sneering at Nicholas Shaw’s Romeo must also be expected, though it is not all his fault. Romeo is a poisoned chalice of a part for any actor: either too green or too white, too dashing or too saccharine. The very name launches a thousand clichés.
Laura Donnelly fares better as Juliet, but it is the bolshy, red-blooded turns of Claire Benedict and Oscar Pearce (Nurse and Mercutio) that save us from an emollient, gooseberry night in with the lovebirds.
Romeo and Juliet is spectacle theatre. It paints in broad strokes and bright colours because it must, and often its aesthetic bravura works beautifully: Juliet’s (second) wedding day turning to her funeral in the blink of an eye, or the caterwauling fights between Montagues and Capulets. The world’s “greatest love story” might be shouted rather than told in this instance, but the message remains on point.
Click here to book tickets
Until August 2 |
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