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When the Royal Court recently announced that it would stage the UK debut of the hugely hyped Broadway smash John Proctor is the Villain, I’d wondered if the show’s UK lead Sadie Sink might come over with it.
The answer, it would seem, is a resounding ‘no’ as the Stranger Things star has, delightfully, announced she’ll be doing a totally different play in London at the same time, starring in a new production of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet directed by Brit auteur Rob Icke.
The youthful Sink will, naturally, play Juliet, one half of Western literature’s most famous doomed couple with Romeo, who’ll be played here by the even younger Noah Jupe, who is probably best known for playing Marcus, the middle child in A Quiet Place and its sequel. He makes his stage debut opposite Sink, who is more of a theatre veteran: the flame-haired actor made her own debut over a decade ago in the title role of a Broadway production of Annie.
What can we expect? Although Icke is an enthusiastic rewriter of the classics, he rarely touches Shakespeare’s language, but does often impose quite radical new interpretations of the action onto the likes of Hamlet and Player Kings (his mash-up of Henry IV parts 1 and 2). His productions are always modern dress, and generally artsy but in an accessible way, and tend to be stacked with a recurrent core crew of British stage actors (though expect more fresh faces for the play’s sundry teenage characters).
Though always popular, Romeo & Juliet is definitely going through a commercial moment right now: last summer saw Jamie Lloyd direct Tom Holland in a UK production that ran at the same time as a Rachel Zegler-starring one did in New York. Don’t expect Icke’s take to be similar to either though – if ever there’s a director with the power to put a totally new spin on a centuries-old classic, it’s him.
Romeo & Juliet is at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Mar 16-Jun 6 2026.
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