You probably want to know about Sadie Sink. But first we must talk about the sure-to-be-divisive device in auteur director Robert Icke’s take on Romeo & Juliet.
It has what one might call Sliding Doors scenes, wherein we see pivotal moments play out differently to Shakespeare’s plot, before a blinding flash of light resets the scene and we see the story take its inexorable turn for the tragic.
At best they’re an effective way of countering the fact that the bleak end of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy is only arrived at by a series of mind-boggling coincidences and mishaps. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello… those guys were probably always going to die. The starcross’d lovers – nope, you can easily imagine a world where things worked out better for them, and in acknowledging this Icke elevates the plot’s sillier moments. However, these interventions are extraneous (it’s obviously not how the play is going to be performed in future) and he overplays his hand in a final scene that teeters on the mawkish. It would have made for a more elegant production if he’d left it be, but auteurs are gonna auteur.
Sadie Sink then. The Stranger Things star is good. She’s very good. And indeed, one of the reasons the parallel universe stuff feels extraneous is that Icke’s cast is so spectacular that having a fiddly conceit gets in the way of them.
The party scene, in which Sink’s gawky Juliet and Noah Jupe’s puppyish Romeo set eyes on each other for the first time, is electric. Rather than go into the do thrown by his family enemies the Capulets, Romeo is waiting bored outside. He’s aware his current object of desire Rosalind is inside and hopes he can catch her when she leaves. Instead he comes face to face with Sink’s Juliet, out for a breather. They are genuinely stunned by the sight of each other, kissing during their very first conversation not because they’re dumb horny teens but because something extraordinary is blasting through their veins and singing in their ears. It’s a remarkable scene: the two of them look shocked, each realising in the same moment that they are irrevocably in love and that their lives have changed forever. He’s sweet, she’s geeky; their chemistry is extraordinary and their love feels real, but almost more than their minds can handle.
If Icke and cast capture the enormity of Romeo and Juliet’s love – the most famous fictional couple in history – they don’t romanticise it. Sink is a clever, quick-witted Juliet who talks with a fierce intelligence: obviously she speaks in rarified Shakespearean verse but there is a sense she can speak so beautifully and feel so much because she is so smart. At the same time she petulantly bawls out her Nurse (Clare Perkins) and carries a knife with her that she repeatedly threatens to use on herself when things look like they’re going south.
Jupe’s Romeo seems like a lovely guy: bouncy, kind and vivacious. Then he murders Aruna Jalloh’s Tybalt with a ferocity that reverberates through the rest of the story. Some productions of the play treat the killing as just another bump in the road - Tybalt did kill Romeo’s pal Mercutio after all. But in Icke’s modern dress production, not only does the killing change our view of Romeo, but the director makes us feel its impact on the Capulets, who go out of their minds with grief in the aftermath.
Auteurs are gonna auteur
Icke periodically deploys a projected digital clock to keep us apprised of the time. It emphasises that this all takes place in a few short days. But it really stresses the fact that nobody is sleeping: what with parties, mourning and late night romantic rendezvous, the point is really made that by the time certain fateful decisions are made, many of the characters have barely slept for days.
The director has clearly given a lot of thought to the text and it’s a proper feast for the second-order characters. We expect a good Mercutio, and we get one: Kasper Hilton-Hille plays him as an erratic, self-destructive livewire. He works himself into an alarming rage during the Queen Mab speech. And he goads Tybalt mercilessly and recklessly - Romeo has actually diffused the situation but Mercutio stokes it right up for his own nihilistic amusement, dooming everyone there. Perkins is terrific as the Nurse, channelling whole episodes’ worth of EastEnders in her loud, tough-as-nails-but-with-a-heart-of-gold turn.
But when was the last time you saw a really great Capulet Snr? Marvel star Clark Gregg is genuinely superb in the role, especially later on as his mind is fried by grief and he decides to marry Juliet off to Lewis Shepherd’s Paris as some sort of attempt to atone for Tybalt’s death. Or what about a great Peter? Yes, there’s a guy called Peter in Romeo & Juliet, a sort of light relief minor Capulet servant who usually gets cut or reduced to a couple of lines. But Jamie Ankrah is a delight as the hapless manservant, exasperatedly trying to keep up with the whims and feuds of his masters.
Toss in a gorgeous, drone-heavy electronic score from Giles Thomas and of course you have something special – it’s Robert Icke, a man who thinks more deeply about the meaning of classic texts than half of their authors probably did, and who you can pretty much reliably expect to find a new angle on a 400-year-old play.
But much as I am a fan, I can’t help but think there’s a parallel universe out there where he didn’t try the Sliding Doors thing (or reined it in a bit) and that that led to an all-timer Romeo & Juliet. In our branch of the multiverse, we’ll have to settle for one that’s merely very good.
