Review: in London, a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that feels surprisingly new
“Is love a tender thing?” asks Romeo at the beginning of the Shakespearean tragedy to which he and Juliet give their names. Not so much, according to the raucous and riveting new production of “Romeo and Juliet” that opened Wednesday at the Almeida Theater here.
It’s no surprise that the courtship between the noble Romeo – played here by the lovely Toheeb Jimoh, from TV’s “Ted Lasso” – and the teenage Juliet will end in disaster. But this production from Rebecca Frecknall – the effervescent British director whose shows often win Olivier awards – treats the often all-too-familiar play as if it were brand new, and the result is stunning.
Frecknall fills in the lyrics by nearly an hour, so that it actually matches the choir’s promised “two hours of traffic from our stage”. to Tennessee Williams and her still-ongoing West End revival of “Cabaret,” rumored to be heading to New York next spring.
Her ‘Romeo and Juliet’, performed without intermission, begins with the cast feverishly clawing at a stage wall, upon which crucial lines from the prologue are projected. But as if in a hurry to get straight to the heart of the play, the wall soon collapses, revealing the bourgeoisie of Verona in the midst of battle. Danger, you sense from the start, is the default mode of a contemporary-looking milieu in which Juliet is described by her father as “a stranger in the world.” That may be because she hasn’t yet experienced life’s abrasions; such awareness will come – and how – with time.
“These violent delights have violent ends,” observes Brother Lawrence (the excellent Paul Higgins), perhaps the most prescient comment in the play. No sooner are Romeo and Juliet introduced than their very existence seems threatened at every step. At one point, the nurse (pussy Jo McInnes, a fine director herself) sits with her face in her hands, fearing the worst.
Elsewhere, Juliet’s father remarks to Paris, his daughter’s betrothed, that “we were born to die”—a remark that has the power of prophecy in this context. Jamie Ballard inflicts a raging rage on Lord Capulet that seems to catch even his own wife off guard. What kind of father would mock his only child as “one too many?”
In the midst of such a toxic family, it’s easy to imagine Juliet wanting the quickest way out, and Frecknall makes us aware of how the play lives in the passage of time. “Tomorrow Wednesday,” the brother says casually, noting a relentless speed that seems to take everyone by surprise. The friar is equally alert to the danger inherent in such impetuosity: “They stumble who run fast,” he warns as the lovers run towards the abyss.
Frecknall has a background in movement, and her “Romeo and Juliet” often feels mid-dance theatre, including generous borrowings from Prokofiev’s celebrated ballet score for this piece.
A male ensemble, featuring main characters such as Benvolio (Miles Barrow) and Jyuddah Jaymes’ haggard Tybalt, moves in undulating rhythms, falls to the floor of Chloe Lamford’s set and back again. Jonathan Holby’s fighting direction introduces a pistol to the arsenal of blades that ends Jack Riddiford’s charismatic Mercutio, here an unashamed provocateur who has barely delivered Queen Mab’s speech when he vanishes. The rules governing this terrifying group of men make no one safe amid the comparably relentless glare of Lee Curran’s shifting beam of light toward the back of the stage.
The fast-rising Jimoh, a 2022 Emmy nominee, brings the same ready sympathy to the stage that he knows from his turn as Sam Obisanya in “Ted Lasso.” What is surprising here is the ease with which he opens up emotionally to Juliet, only to realize too late that the options available to this couple are running out. It’s also fascinating to see how the balcony scene has been reconfigured so that Romeo sits on top of a ladder and speaks to Juliet at the center of the stage, reversing the iconic imagery of the play.
Referring to “this world-weary flesh,” Jimoh’s Romeo sounds like an embryonic Hamlet. Hainsworth, for her part, played Hermia a few years ago, a young lover with an equally ruthless father in the Bridge Theatre’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Juliet is a much bigger role and the actress sometimes gets so lost in her character’s grief that the language itself becomes clouded or lost. (Hainsworth will reunite with Frecknall in an adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba” for the National Theater in November.)
But I have seldom heard an audience as attentive as that of the Almeida as Hainsworth’s sore throat gave way to a surprisingly vivid suicide from which several of the actors around me visibly flinched.
You may not be surprised to see Frecknall end the play with Julia’s desperate act. Once you have recovered the sting of death, all that remains is silence.
Romeo and Juliet