Romeo and Juliet

Synopsis

The story of frustrated young (illegally young in modern terms) love and death and the vendetta between two families in a tight-knit Italian community. One of Shakespeare's most popular and enduring dramas it has also been re-done as film, ballet, musical (most notably "West Side Story") and ice spectacular!

Our Review:

3 December 2010

The RSC’s five year seasonal residency at the Roundhouse in Camden opened this week with Rupert Goold’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Set on a thrust stage, similar to the one at Stratford, the Roundhouse affords an intimacy so desperately needed with this play; love and loss, revenge and regret are dishes best served up close.

A wonderfully light first half hour begins with a great piece of theatrical trickery from Goold. The prologue, usually conducted with a weighty, doom-laden gravitas is conducted as an audio guide with Romeo (Sam Troughton) looking around some imagined catacomb. First in Italian then in English, its novel delivery brushes aside the play’s gloomy end and allows camera-wielding Romeo to conduct his reverie to Rosalind in peace. It is not long, however, before the ensemble up the ante at the Capulet’s masked ball. Conjuring a ferociously charged, tribal melee, replete with dancing an...

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Latest User Review

Mick Greenway - 5 March 2011:

Was this production intended to reveal the heart of Shakespeare's play or to impress the audience with the brilliance and inventiveness of the director? The latter, I'm afraid. True, the production presented us with many coups de theatre and there was clearly intent to point up significant aspects of the plot and explore the motivation of the characters but, sadly, the whole was much less than the sum of the parts. In this incoherent hotchpotch, we are given, as someone once said about the work of the philosopher, David Hume, local clarity but global obscurity. The best feature of this disappointing piece (given all the hype) is the performance of Mariah Gale as Juliet. She is superb as a fragile, bolshie thirteen-year-old heroine and nowhere better than in the balcony scene. ...

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