Doing something genuinely original with Romeo and Juliet is no mean feat. Contemporary productions all tend to try and modernise it, from Jamie Lloyd’s divisive recent West End run and Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler’s sequin-clad 2024 Broadway show to its earnest, teen suicide stats-filled last outing at the Globe in 2021.
That Sean Holmes’s latest Globe version refuses to go down this path at all should be commended in and of itself. Instead, it transposes fair Verona to the rootin’ tootin’ American West, the cast donning stetsons and petticoats befitting a trad production of Oklahoma! as the sighs of our star-cross’d lovers are scored by a banjo and intercut with the odd ‘yee-haw!’ Does it make things a little confusing that all the actors speak in their own accents? Absolutely! Yet the actual originality – as opposed to quote-unquote edgy Romeo and Juliets that have become highly predictable – is admirable.
Given the double suicide foretold up top, this Romeo and Juliet is remarkably unafraid to have fun. The Western theme is wrung tightly to eke out every last drop of comic potential, from the awkward line dancing at the Capulet ball to a brief appearance of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly theme. Equally up for embracing their comic sides are the cast. Played by recent drama school graduate Rawaed Asde, the Romeo we first meet longing after Rosalind is more frustrated than infatuated, and Juliet (Lola Shalam) matches his loud, boisterous energy. She is no dainty, helpless heroine, but rather cut from the same cloth as her Nurse, played with vim by Jamie-Rose Monk and making the two an unexpected comedy double act.
There are parts, however, where this comic focus doesn’t work. While Michael Elcock initially steals every scene with his vibrant, camp Mercutio, his physical comedy long after being stabbed feels somewhat hammy. His character, just like Juliet, is so full of life that others feel like an afterthought. I wanted to see more in Calum Callaghan’s Tybalt, yet struggled to get any kind of read on the character, and therefore justify Juliet’s hurt in his death.
At any given point, laughter is just around the corner. The balcony scene is somehow made one of the funniest of the lot when Juliet is wheeled into the audience clutching the balustrade, yet it’s the undeniable chemistry between Asde and Shalam that’s the star attraction. When they dance at the ball (Romeo and his crew in fringed masks playfully nodding to country musician Orville Peck), the couple fizz, their touch worlds away from the chaste hand holding and toe tapping previously engaged with at the party.
But despite all the jokes, we know the way this story ends. A bloody red hand print is smeared to the right of the saloon doors on Paul Will’s set, an omnipresent reminder that death is coming. Mercutio tries to fight his own, while Tybalt’s panting and twitching is gruesome and undignified in a different way. Death is brutal and inescapable. It’s also somewhat impermanent; both later return as ghosts, just as Romeo and Juliet’s corpses are reanimated while the other dies. Sure, Romeo standing to say the show’s final line felt like an unnecessary diversion from the original text, but you have to admire the Globe’s commitment to doing something different than the different we’re used to.
