The Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group’s Romeo and Juliet is just the sort of production that can give Shakespeare a bad name. It’s vague, poorly acted, unimaginative, badly stylised and consequently incredibly tedious to sit through for anyone who isn’t a family-member or friend of the cast.
Looking through the EGTG’s recent programming, this isn’t always the case - for an amateur theatre group they’ve commendably engaged with some interesting material - Butterworth, Churchill, McDonagh. This Romeo and Juliet is first and foremost overwhelmingly bland. Director Lorna Slater observes in her production notes that ‘Romeo and Juliet is the play everyone thinks they know’ and that she has taken a ‘fresh look’ at the text. Well, anything new she gleaned from this reading experience hasn’t found its way into the production, which does little more than go through the motions. It is Shakespeare-by-numbers.
Firstly, the design: Slater has ‘used only partial costumes to give the play a hint of renaissance feel.’ She wants the characters ‘to be both timeless and of a particular time’. It’s not at all clear how this effect follows on from her method. She’s hedging her bets and the result is vague. What we get instead is a production set in the purgatorial Amateur Dramatic Shakespeare Land, where everyone wears terrible faux-Elizabethan costumes supplemented by an array of Primark chinos and black jeans. It reveals nothing at all about the text and distances the actors from anything close to a lively and insightful reality.
The performances consistently suffer from a stultifying generality and lack of close attention to the text. This means that none of the actors are able to bring anything to their characterisation: both Sam Gray’s Romeo and Lauri Young’s Juliet are entirely unmemorable and uninteresting. Everyone skates over their lines as if they wish they had something else to say instead; they’re not using the richness and complexity of the text at all.
Everyone’s rather on autopilot, marking pre-rehearsed gestures and emotions. Shouting becomes shorthand for angry and upset. Rarely does anybody on stage approach a single scene with any clear intentionality and conviction. Small exceptions to this are Sian Fiddimore’s nurse, who has a certain gumption, and Brian Thomson’s Lord Capulet, who is the most natural and comfortable performer on stage. Which says rather a lot.
It’s no wonder, though, that the actors aren’t able to give interesting performances when the whole production has been approached without imagination or clarity. This is the Romeo and Juliet that everybody thinks they know.
