Shakespeare's R&J | Theatre | The Guardian
Theatre This article is more than 20 years oldReviewShakespeare's R&J
This article is more than 20 years oldArts Theatre, LondonRomeo and Juliet is an unusually obliging play: it has yielded, among much else, West Side Story, the Baz Luhrmann movie, the stunning Macmillan ballet. But my grouse about this version, adapted and directed by Joe Calarco for New York's Splinter Group, is that it limits rather than expands the play's possibilities, making it seem like a louche version of Tom Brown's Schooldays.
Calarco's conceit is that we are watching a quartet of repressed male adolescents discovering their emotions through Shakespeare's play. Suffering from parade-ground drill and conjugated verbs, they come across a secret copy of Romeo and Juliet and use it to act out their own erotic fantasies. They snigger over the dirty bits, enjoy the fighting and, conquering their initial shyness, find themselves drawn into a dream-like world of love and death.
That at least is the theory. But Calarco muddles the conventions by giving these supposedly innocent schoolboys a surprisingly alert knowledge of Oriental theatre techniques: their use of a bolt of red cloth, for instance, to symbolise daggers, drugs or blood implies they are well schooled in Japanese Noh theatre.
More seriously the unremitting focus on post-pubescent self-discovery reduces the play's tonal variety; we don't get much sign of the play's social comedy, internecine strife or stark fatalism. This is less Romeo and Juliet than a deodorised version of Wedekind's Spring Awakening without the mutual masturbation.
A few of Calarco's images stay with one: the moment where Friar Laurence inducts Juliet into a world of feigned death by drawing her towards him with the serpentine coil of red cloth is particularly impressive. But, in this radically cut version, we lose the crucial pay-off, which is Juliet's terrified fantasy of awaking in the corpse-strewn family vault. And, although the four actors are agile, they lack the crucial Shakespearean ability to give the language a physical life. The result is a curious footnote to Shakespeare's play rather than a realisation of its complexities. The actors concerned - Matthew Sincell, Jason Michael Spelbring, Jeremy Beck and Jason Dubin - are adequate, but none of them has the force of personality to impose himself on the text. You get lots of additions to the play, including sonnets and echoes of A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the transformation of Romeo and Juliet into a study of hothouse boys' school passion reduces it to the level of John van Druten's Young Woodley.
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