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Baz Luhrman’s screen ‘Romeo & Juliet’ may have been for teenagers. But it never really felt like it was about them. Yes, Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes were young at the time, but you’d hardly describe their versions of the doomed teens as just a pair of regular kids. In fact, almost no take on Shakespeare’s great romantic tragedy feels like the star cross’d lovers are doing and saying things for the reasons teenagers do and say things.
That in a nutshell is what Kimberley Sykes’s production brings to the table: her lovers are giddy with the wild certainties of youth, fizzy with reckless abandon, and blessedly low on portent and pathos. Less than two hours long, it’s a breathless and joyful excursion that zips along at speed, scenes tumbling into each other with the fumbling urgency of Romeo and Juliet’s brief, blissful relationship.
Okay, I don’t think leads Isabel Adomakoh Young and Joel MacCormack are actually teens, nor do I think that real-life Gen-Z-ers wander around spouting sixteenth-century iambic pentameter while getting into occasional sword fights.
But the characters are teens, and there’s just something so much more plausible about Young’s Juliet tearing through ‘soft, what light’ et al in urgent excitement rather than careful adult savouring of the verse. The timeframe of the play is negligible, a couple of days: the lovers may famously come to a bad end, but in Sykes’s production they’re far too loved up to really notice that things are spinning out of control until they’ve already fallen off the cliff.
Is the passion between MacCormack’s adorkable Romeo and Young’s winningly chipper Juliet deep and meaningful? Would their clandestine marriage, unbeknownst to their warring families, have actually gone the distance if Romeo hadn’t been forced to kill Juliet’s psychotic cousin Tybalt (Michelle Fox) in self-defence? I think the really clever thing about Sykes’s production is that these questions feel irrelevant: the two leads are crushing so hard on each other they’re almost immune to logic or reality or long-term thinking. They might have got bored and dumped each other the next week if they had the chance. But they don’t, and so we have a story.
The two leads are the motor behind the show, breakneck but never unclear. Judicious cuts to the text help maintain the momentum (spoiler alert, but Juliet doesn’t faff around trying to kiss the poison off Romeo’s lips at the end, she just cracks on and stabs herself), as does Giles Thomas’s dreamily urgent score, all looped violins and metronomic beats.
There are faults. Beyond the title characters, some of the performances are a little uneven, and there is a cringy device wherein we ‘see’ each casualty’s soul leaving their body (the actor stands up and looks in shock at the space where they were lying, proper Marcel Marceau vibes).
But this stuff you can easily forgive in a production that’s not based around a meticulous interpretation of the play’s language, but a kinetic engagement with its essence. It’s a celebration of young lust, and of being too new to life to have any fear of throwing it away.