Romeo & Juliet review: this optimistic take is quietly radical
Romeo and Juliet review and star rating: ★★★★
Following Tom Holland’s vulnerable, impressionable Romeo in Jamie Lloyd’s 2024 adaptation, could there be another truly fresh take?
Yes, according to directorial powerhouse Robert Icke, who delivers a technically cool, youthfully exuberant production that comes with a shocking twist.
His Romeo & Juliet celebrates the lives of these star-crossed lovers rather than focusing obsessively on their much-reported deaths. Following recent megawatt productions including Ian McKellen’s Player Kings, Andrew Scott’s Hamlet and Mark Strong and Lesley Manville’s Oedipus, here Icke delivers the kind of expansive, genre-busting work that made him the youngest director to win an Olivier Award in 2015 (for Oresteia at the Almeida).
This Romeo & Juliet goes beyond the Bard – but won’t annoy purists
He wants us to focus on youth: its hot-headedness as well as the ecstasy of teenage love (the Bard wrote Juliet to be 13 and Romeo a few years older). To get us there, Icke’s whimsical adaptation features dream sequences: fleeting but indulgent trips to imagined realities that don’t exist in the Bard’s text.
Sadie Sink, who is 23, of Netflix’s Stranger Things, is arresting as Juliet – her anxious, angsty Capulet is particularly compelling, especially during her monologues. Noah Jupe, the 21-year-old who recently starred with Paul Mescal in Hamnet, is capable but less commanding opposite her as Romeo.
It isn’t just Jupe and Sink who bring Gen Z into the building – Hilegard Bechtler’s minimalistic set, featuring rustic eggshell backdrops, metal sheeting and a very prominent bed feels definitively cool.
Sound design by Giles Thomas features the sustaining whir of an electronic soundtrack, which sounds like over production but is just plainly effective in sustaining tension. Together with lighting designer Jon Clark’s experimental use of light, often featuring torches that illuminate actors’ hands on the ceilings, this is an engulfing, multi-sensory experience.
Shout-outs must go to Kasper Hilton-Hille’s hilariously queer-coded Mercutio and Clare Perkins’ thigh-slapping nurse, two totems of the show’s brilliant comedic sensibility.
It’s solid stuff, but everything pales by comparison to the finale, which dares to rethink everything you know. Who on earth would rethink the finale of Romeo and Juliet? Robert Icke, a man who has a good enough grasp of subtlety to know when to come out all guns blazing. It’s a risk, and blimey, every hair on both of my arms stood up.
It reminded me of Russell T Davies’ stance on It’s A Sin, his televisual homage to the victims of the AIDS epidemic, in which he celebrated the lives, the joy, and backgrounded the sadness. In achieving that without turning off the Shakespeare purists, what Icke has done here is quietly radical.
Romeo & Juliet plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 20 June