Romeo and Juliet

I’ve seen this play a lot. Maybe too many times. It is arguably Shakespeare’s most accessible for audiences; though we may not all be Princes or regicidal Scotsmen, we’ve all been young and in love. However, it is far from the best written. It’s a young dramatist’s play, full of potential melodrama, some overblown writing and some horribly jangling verse. It’s a tribute, then, to the youngsters from Kidbrooke School, that I was entertained and impressed throughout, and shed a tear at the end.Owing something to both Baz Lurman’s film and West Side Story, the landscape here is gritty and urban. The opening scene, where the violent strife between the two houses of Capulet and Montague is set up, is here rendered as a terrifying sequence of mindless happy slapping style beatings. When the Prince orders the participants to ‘throw your mistemepered weapons to the ground’ it becomes a slogan for the kind of anti-knife crime campaign springing up these days in all of our major cities.This is the first of many ingenious touches which bring the play alive for a modern audience. The design (Robin Thompson), lighting (Natasha Chivers and soundscape are fantastic, and we really believe in this world. Director Lucy Cuthbertson takes much of the credit for the stunning ensemble work, and original idea upon original idea. The sinister hoodie-clad kids who circle some scenes on their silent bikes are as scary as any Doctor Who Villain. She has also cut the play intelligently, trimming or even leaving out some of the more difficult emotional or verse passages. There is much use of projectors and modern technology. The people of Verona are invite to the Capulet’s ball on Facebook! The acting, as you might expect with such young people, is patchy. Michal Omo-Bare has some good moments as the hapless Romeo, and Kay Payne is particularly strong as Juliet as the full impact of the tragedy that’s unfolding because of her unfolds. There’s a very strange piece of casting as the nurse – Billy Beswick is very funny in the role, but was clearly a camp boy rather than the matronly woman who would have suckled Juliet fourteen years ago. This casting is further skewed by having the nurse’s servant, Peter, also played camp or gay. I’m not sure what the message was here.The verse speaking is universally appalling, I’m afraid, which is forgivable. What is less forgivable is that some passages were clearly not understood by the speaker judging by the misinflecting and juxtapositioning of words (I told you I’d seen this too many times). Making sure this didn’t happen was also part of the director’s job.I would, however, urge you to see this production just for it’s sheer energy and invention. In the final moments, when the stage is left empty but for three body bags containing three dead young people those words appear again writ large in blood red on the backdrop to the action:Throw Your Mistempered Weapons To The Ground.Never have I seen this message clatter down the centuries so powerfully. And never has it been more timely.