Most productions of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ are about life: it’s a play about two young people who meet, fall in love and burn through a lifetime in a few days, their passion too intense to be bound to our slow, mundane world.
I think Jamie Lloyd’s production of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ is about death. Taking place in a gloomy void, Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’s titular lovers speak in halting, hushed voices, and the action jumps and skips like a half-remembered dream, as if they were looking back on all this from a great distance.
In his very first scene, Holland’s impassive Romeo puts his hand in a puddle of blood and stares at it in detatched bewilderment - whose blood is it? It’s vaguely implied it’s left over from a recent street brawl. But it feels more like a portent of death. When Joshua-Alexander Williams’s doomed Mercutio does the Queen Mab speech – usually a fizzy showstopper to demonstrate the character’s wit – he does so in a haunted whisper, a tear trickling from his eye, like a shade fleetingly remembering what it was to be alive.
It is an undeniably oppressive, disorientating way to stage the play. But after a period of adjustment I really liked its haunting stream of consciousness flow. Whether or not Lloyd has literally made it about ghosts, he cuts out the teen drama, false hope, could-have-turned-out-differently stuff. As old Capulet (later cribbed by Lana del Rey) says, ‘we were born to die’. That’s the sum of it: this is a show about dead people.
It’s staged like a particularly stylish radio play, the cast frequently standing static but artfully framed, talking into old fashioned floor mics. The vibe feels a lot closer to ‘Under Milk Wood’ or ‘Our Town’ or even Beckett than contemporary Shakespeare practice, suiting the existential tone.
The tension here is that much as Lloyd’s vision is the show’s dominant feature, Holland is one of the most famous people in the entire world. Who knows what an audience more here for him than Lloyd or Shakespeare will make of it all – heck, maybe Lloyd has gambled that he can be a little weirder for an audience mostly happy to see their hero. Raw-eyed, unsmiling and with hysterically sculpted arms, this is about as far from Peter Parker as it gets. But it’s a good performance: Holland has a powerful stillness to him that occasionally boils into a dark, disturbing rage at the unfairness of it all.
Playing Juliet, Amewudah-Rivers is a relatively little-known actor who has suffered a degree of online persecution from – let’s be honest – American internet racists after her casting was announced. She is great. She has a lightness that contrasts with Holland’s dour angst. But you can also really hear why they cast her: she has a beautiful voice, an elegant lilt that works perfectly in a production that eschews physical business.
The dark, deathly tone means the central romance isn’t exactly what you’d call horny and hot blooded, but then again, they are snogging each other within about 30 seconds of meeting: the stripped down, snipped up text feels more like fragmented memories of their relationship than the relationship entire (do not go in expecting a balcony scene).
This could all make for an unbearably dour couple of hours, but the supporting characters are a lot more fun: Freema Agyeman is a hoot as a cougar-y Nurse, Tomiwa Edun is inspired as a strict Nigerian dad Capulet; and Michael Balogun is superb as the Friar – he has a righteous, preacherly air that elegantly collapses into panic as he realises that the tragedy that unfurls is, in its way, largely his fault.
Some snarky internet commentators looked at the early production shots and concluded that the monochrome palette and use of live video means Lloyd is repeating the same tricks as last year’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’. In truth it’s hard to imagine two productions more different in tone. There’s nothing here at all like ‘Sunset Boulevard’s swaggering section performed to camera in the street. But the camera work is important: live filmed sequences in the theatre’s bar and on its roof stand in for the Capulet party and Romeo’s exile in Padua; both are surprisingly bright and dynamic, livening up the otherwise deliberately static staging. I think this sort of stuff is just part of Lloyd and his longterm designer Soutra Gilmore’s style now – she is a big advocate for carbon neutral design and found spaces are a lot more environmentally friendly than building a set.
For Lloyd, ‘Romeo & Juliet’ is another step down his increasingly auteur-ish path. Exactly what’s in it for Holland is an intriguing question – it shows he’s versatile, can work in an ensemble, and rise to the challenge of leftfield director’s theatre (and is stacked), but it’s not the sort of BIG Shakespearean performance that necessarily wins a bunch of awards and shifts the dial on Spider-Man being the thing he’s known for. It’s a pretty weird night at the theatre, frankly. But adjust to its fugue state and it’s deeply compelling. Another one of Shakespeare’s heroes asked what dreams may come in death. This unsettling production feels like the answer.