There is often a startling difference between a memory of a person, place or play and its reality. I thought this was cognitive dissonance but I’ve just checked and it isn’t. The effect I’m talking about can easily be experienced by going to visit your old Primary School: it will look much smaller and starker now than when it was most of your world.
I had remembered Romeo and Juliet, mostly because of Baz Luhrmann, as a sunlit, exuberant extravaganza of romance and energy that goes ‘a bit pear shaped’ towards the end. That it ain’t, as you will find if you go and see – and you really should – Rupert Goold’s excellent RSC production at The Courtyard Theatre in Stratford.
The tone is set for Goold’s Verona in the violent opening scene: dark figures grapple with each other amidst tongues of flame on a black, oppressive stage and Benvolio is almost burnt alive by Joseph Arkley’s ferocious Tybalt. A deeply Catholic Hispanic setting is conjured for the two warring families to conduct their blood feud, all in Elizabethan costume bar the star-crossed lovers in modern dress and a world of their own. There are no second chances here: justice is summary, duels are to the death and Richard Katz, as a fantastic Lord Capulet, leaves Mariah Gale’s spirited Juliet in no doubt that a father’s word is law. Goold is simply staging what Shakespeare wrote: never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
Comedy is provided by Jonjo O’Neill’s irrepressible Mercutio and Noma Dumezweni’s caustic Nurse. Sam Troughton entirely avoids mawkish sentimentality as a cerebral Romeo who has more in common with Hamlet – if I’ve remembered that play properly – than with Leonardo Di Caprio.
The unremitting gloom of the black stage and copious amounts of dry ice occasionally threaten to engulf uniformly strong performances over nearly three and a half hours but the verse is spoken with such conviction and clarity that you will be sorry when it is over.
Rome and Juliet runs at The Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from 12 March to 27 August 2010.
