Duke of York’s Theatre

Most productions of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ are about life: it’s a play about two young people who meet, fall in love and burn through a lifetime in a few days, their passion too intense to be bound to our slow, mundane world.  I think Jamie Lloyd’s production of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ is about death. Taking place in a gloomy void, Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’s titular lovers speak in halting, hushed voices, and the action jumps and skips like a half-remembered dream, as if they were looking back on all this from a great distance. In his very first scene, Holland’s impassive Romeo puts his hand in a puddle of blood and stares at it in detatched bewilderment - whose blood is it? It’s vaguely implied it’s left over from a recent street brawl. But it feels more like a portent of death. When Joshua-Alexander Williams’s doomed Mercutio does the Queen Mab speech – usually a fizzy showstopper to demonstrate the character’s wit – he does so in a haunted whisper, a tear trickling from his eye, like a shade fleetingly remembering what it was to be alive.    It is an undeniably oppressive, disorientating way to stage the play. But after a period of adjustment I really liked its haunting stream of consciousness flow. Whether or not Lloyd has literally made it about ghosts, he cuts out the teen drama, false hope, could-have-turned-out-differently stuff. As old Capulet (later cribbed by Lana del Rey) says, ‘we were born to die’. That’s the sum of it: this is a

This review is from the Bush Theatre in February. In August ‘Shifters’ will transfer to the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End. In ‘Shifters’, Benedicte Lombe’s follow-up to her Susan Blackburn Prize-winning play ‘Lava’, sparks fly and past emotions weave their way into the present. Why is the feeling of falling in love for the first time so profound?, it asks. Will we remember it forever? In this bittersweet, woozy rom-com the imprint of big, wild adolescent infatuation can’t be forgotten. Dre and Des met at school, joined the debating society and danced awkwardly around their romantic feelings for one another, until one day everything changed. It has been eight years since they last were together, but all their history comes rushing back. Dre’s beloved ‘nana’ has died and Des has flown over for the funeral. But in the years they’ve spent apart things have started to look a little different. They are 32 now and Des has fulfilled her dream of becoming a successful artist in America, while Dre has worked hard on realising his culinary ambitions closer to home. And yet still, their old electricity finds a way to climb back to the surface. The wonder of Lombe’s writing is that it leaves you longing for the story of what could have and should have been. Instead, we watch a poetic tale about two perfectly matched souls excruciatingly separated. The beginning of Lynette Linton’s production is a deliberate slow burn. The romance between the duo creeps in slowly, but once it land