TheatreguideLondon
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The TheatreguideLondon Review
Romeo and Juliet
Roundhouse Winter 2010-2011
It is kept from real success by an obtrusive, irrelevant and pointless production concept and by a charm vacuum at its centre.
In director Rupert Goold's imagination both Romeo and Juliet are 21st-century figures in a Renaissance world - he (Sam Troughton) wears a hoodie, carries a digital camera and rides a bicycle; she (Mariah Gale) wears trainers, even at the ball, and if she isn't actually chewing gum, she looks like she wishes she were.
No one around them seems to notice any anachronisms - Benvolio even borrows the camera for a while - and so they're just there. Whatever the point of this device is - to suggest Romeo and Juliet are timeless? to give the schoolkids dragged to the theatre something to relate to? - it just sits there, calling attention to itself and away from the play.
This play lives or dies with its two central performers, and their job, above all else, is to capture our emotions and charm us with the image of a perfect and doomed love. As past productions have shown, the actors can do this by speaking the poetry beautifully, by conveying the wonder and thrill of first love, or even just by being young and lovely to look at.
Each of the stars of this production has occasional moments of touching one or another of those goals, but never both at the same time, and neither can sustain the magic beyond a brief moment.
Sam Troughton gives some sense of boyish openness, particularly in the early scenes, but (along with most of the secondary cast) he tends to recite his lines as dead poetry rather than speaking them as living language.
Mariah Gale does capture that sound of natural human language in the Balcony Scene, but never again; she's completely defeated by Juliet's more poetic speeches, and she stands around with a lumpen earthbound dullness, offering no sense of Juliet's spiritual airiness or even her quick mind.
Elsewhere, aside from a lot of flames being shot out of the floor or shown on film projections at every opportunity, we get background performances and action that are noticeable only in their irrelevant quirkiness.
In this Verona Mercutio (Jonjo O'Neill) is Irish and Tybalt (Joseph Arkley) Scottish, evidently just because those are the actors' native accents and the director saw no reason to disguise them. Noma Dumezweni's no-nonsense Nurse has had many of her comic lines cut, and the character is considerably less interesting as a result.
The ball is a mix of The Rite Of Spring and a Hot Gossip number, with a bit of Afro-Caribbean thrown in, its only effect being to kill any thought of Juliet as a prim virgin.
Hey, this is a great play. A production considerably worse than this would still be unable to destroy it. It's not so much that Rupert Goold's concepts and casting damage the play as that they keep getting in its way.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review - Romeo and Juliet - RSC at Roundhouse 2010
