Review: ROMEO AND JULIE, National Theatre

Set against the Welsh cityscape, Romeo - aka Romey - and Julie are an unemployed single dad and his clever, Cambridge-bound new love interest. Raised only a few streets from one another, their upbringings couldn't have been more different. Shakespeare's feuding families are placed in a modern context of A Levels and young infatuation in this wannabe romantic riff on the Bard's socio-political tragedy. The playwright Gary Owen rejoins director Rachel O'Riordan after last year's Iphigenia in Splott for a disappointing take on the lovers.

Callum Scott Howells (Channel 4's It's a Sin, Cabaret at the Playhouse Theatre) and theatre starlet Rosie Sheehy are joined by Paul Brennen and Anita Reynolds as her parents and Catrin Aaron as Romeo's "raging alcoholic" mother. The piece accidentally leans too much into distasteful Welsh stereotypes while Owen tries to make us sympathise with the youngsters. Romeo persuades Julie to study at Cardiff Uni after she falls pregnant and her father kicks her out with cheesy dialogue and a severe underestimation of the audience's intelligence.

Thankfully - spoiler alert - her mum talks some sense into her and saves her from drowning into a nuclear family at 18 years old. She gets an abortion and leaves for Cambridge, abandoning a miserable but understanding Romeo. Her excuse for letting him persuade her in the first place? She believed he knew that she was willingly exchanging one of the best universities in the world for a life with him. He swears he was unaware of the reputation of the Oxbridge lot; in the 21st Century and current climate, pleading ignorance and naivety is a bit of a stretch.

The characters are introduced either as ignorant simpletons or irredeemable drunks except for Julie. What Owen does well, though, is taking the shine out of Romeo and Juliet's original story and putting it into perspective. The play, however, takes itself way too seriously and tries to convince its public that it's really a tragedy and not a bitter farce.

It's sad that Julie falls for someone with completely different prospects in life, but it's not the epic of love and loss they want us to believe. It's predictable and vexing, featuring insensitive writing that sinks into overly elegiac pits of misery. O'Riordan directs with a serious Brechtian verve that includes nicely done physical work, pumping the scene changes with thumping music and keeping props to a minimum. The actors sit at the back, shrouded in darkness, observing the action in stillness.

Howells licks his lips and chews his gums constantly, perhaps in a bid to appear as laddish as his role is supposed to be. Besides the weird mouth acting, he gives a soulful performance, gradually opening up as his character grows up. He shares great chemistry with Sheehy, but her delivery is overdramatic and shouty. Aaron offers by far the most compelling portrayal as Barb, who's unintentionally hypocritical and opportunistic, while Brennan and Reynolds are the most relatable and easy to empathise with. No one is a villain.

While the premise of young love is the same, there are no feuding families or grand morals in Romeo and Julie. It's reduced to a feeble plot of teenage nonsense. There are some positive patches: Romeo shows maturity beyond his age when his daughter is concerned, going from a fearful disgust of baby poo to utter devotion and selflessness. Jack Knowles lights the stage with neon squiggles resembling a child's representation of planets that hint at Julie's passion for physics and outer space. It's a creative stroke.

Owens scratches the surface of Welsh underdevelopment and economic deprivation, going as far as giving Julie a perfunctory invective against posh kids, but refraining from digging deeper into the issues. It's disheartening to see such a big platform being under-exploited to the benefit of a silly narrative. Having a diversity of accents across three stages doesn't automatically guarantee quality.

Romeo and Julie runs at The National Theatre until 1 April.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

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