Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe – review

How do you “refresh” Romeo and Juliet, a play so completely subsumed within contemporary culture that much of the script now sounds cliché? According to director Sean Holmes, you make it a Western.

And it works. The Capulets’ first swagger through the swinging saloon doors prompts cheers from the audience, and the cowboy boot heels make a pleasing clink against the Globe’s worn wooden floors; Grant Olding’s honkytonk saloon soundtrack easily morphs from lackadaisical to high stakes, and the guns give an added layer of jeopardy: small skirmishes move from fists to knives to a piercing shot, and suddenly we’re not messing around anymore.

But the truth is, it doesn’t matter what the setting is. It’s the delivery of the script that counts, and deliver they do. Romeo’s (Rawaed Asde) first conversation with Benvolio (Roman Asde) quickly sets the tone: melodramatically mourning his unrequited love for Rosaline, he sullenly kicks the floor, performing his lines like a bad spoken-word poet. He’s no moody, mysterious DiCaprio, and this is no sexy, serious love story. This is a hilarious teen romance gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The chemistry between Asde’s Romeo and Lola Shalam’s Juliet is brilliant in that they’re just two horny teenagers who happen to have landed on each other as targets. The wooing conversation of saints and pilgrims becomes quickfire banter, Shalam furiously blushing and giggling with every retort; the balcony scene in which the lovers are finally alone is just a rush of hormones, Shalam and Asde spewing puppy-love nonsense at each other. The point being, they’re children. Which makes the inevitable tragedy all the more heartbreaking, starting with a teenage crush and ending with a pile of corpses. When the usually cocksure Benvolio describes the violent sequence of events beginning with Mercutio’s death, he is suddenly a blubbering little boy confessing to the adults, only for them to behave, themselves, like petulant children.

The only trouble in this interpretation is working out the moment to pull it back. When is it no longer a joke? Mercutio’s death, for example, feels minimised: Having been mortally stabbed Michael Elcock, up to this point a debonair wordsmith, is still delivering his lines with a dandy flourish, and the audience is still laughing, unsure whether to believe him. His final moments see him crawling across the front of the stage, landing on the lip, again the audience laughing at his proximity. But before the seriousness of what has occurred can sink in, his is risen, declaring his last, iconic lines – “A plague on both your houses! They have made worms’ meat of me” – as some kind of ghost, before walking himself quietly off stage.

It becomes clear later, after repetition of the idea, that this is a style choice: characters die and become ghosts. But in this first instance, it doesn’t quite land and Mercutio’s death, an important moment in tonal change, feels by the by. This seems easily fixed, with maybe a beat or two longer on the more somber moments before the script moves on. Let the audience check their laughter and catch up to the tragedy.

Holmes’ decision to restore the dead characters to a ghost status comes to a powerful culmination in the final scene in which Romeo finds Juliet in her tomb. But she is not alone, accompanied by the other victims of this misadventure. As Romeo contemplates his impending suicide, they all rise to perform one last slow dance together, creating a painful nostalgia for the story’s childish beginnings. When the poison suddenly kicks in, the sharp incongruity shows just how avoidable and miserable this tragedy is.