BWW Reviews: ROMEO + JULIET, Rose Theatre Kingston, March 4 2015

That weight of history presses down on any production of Romeo and Juliet - what to do when everyone knows the ending (and if they don't, they get told it right at the start anyway). The play's extraordinary mutability has kept it as thrillingly alive as its lovers are dead, but where's the angle, where's the shock of the new, where's the story in 2015?

Director Sally Cookson has piled one radical move on top of another in her Romeo + Juliet (continuing at the Rose Theatre, Kingston until 21 March) and, though it never stops being fascinating and flies by at a clip, it doesn't always satisfy.

What works?

The plain wooden multi-level set offers almost as much vertical movement as the broad stage offers horizontal - as emotions rise and fall, so too do the characters, through physical space as much as mental. Benji Bower's music has something of the horror movie genre's sense of foreboding in it, especially with its fractured Prokofiev at the masked ball, and it also has echoes of Kraftwerk's Timeless City about it too - Capulet and Montague are flung together for love and hate becuase that's what cities do. As Juliet, Audrey Brisson's tomboyish look (bob hair, jeans and Ben Sherman shirt) and otherworldly Bjorkish singing plays well against Joseph Drake's nervous, slight Romeo. Neither Prom Queen nor Uber Jock, the extraordinary words fall from the couple's somewhat ordinary lips, gaining not losing power for it.

What doesn't work?

Mercutio (Laura Elphinstone) is continually upping the stakes in the feud, but the pitch of a female voice declaiming such violence had me thinking about an unexplained backstory rather than an excess of testosterone. Maureen Beattie's Capulet is brutal in her threat to cast out Juliet if she refuses Paris, but without both parents assailing the forlorn, lovelorn girl, the scene takes on overtones of female intergenerational jealousy, rather than the cold economic transaction it appears when the father is "selling" his daughter. What's gone on between Capulet and Paris, I found myself asking as the plot charged forward. And, as is often the case with Romeo and Juliet, the words come a little too quickly, some lost as the ear attunes to the music that weaves in and out of the scenes. Those words alone can carry the gut-wrenching turmoil - they need not be shouted.

Rounding out this curate's egg of a production, the always magnificent Sharon D Clarke as Nurse and Javier Marzan as Spanish servant Pedro garner laughs that made me somewhat uncomfortable - the exaggerated Jamaican accent and Manuelish cowering incompetence felt like a throwback to the less savoury aspects of 70s sitcom to me, but the audience loved it. I preferred Ms Clarke's sensational singing.

So, not your usual tale of underage sex, drugs and gangland violence (indeed, Juliet is given a couple more years, possibly to assuage 21st century sensibilities) but a production that uncovers interpretations of the play that are often left unexplored - possibly with good reason. And, yet again, one can't help feeling - oh for a text, a Snapchat, a DM tweet and not that wretched undelivered letter!

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