Romeo & Juliet
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

The Verona which Ralph Koltai has imagined for the latest Romeo and Juliet (Stratford-on-Avon) is an intimidatingly stylized urban jungle, composed of revolving slabs of wall, decorated by some civic-minded action painter. They have to be trundled around by half-lit supers, which seems to me to diminish their utility considerably, but when in position they make a fitting environment for roving teenage thugs.

‘Punk,’ one mutters when the lads first appear, but the analogy is imprecise. The young Montagues and Capulets are hardly underprivileged. The period of Ron Daniel’s production is hard to locate, but Romeo’s zippered leather takes us back 25 years to Marlon Brando and ‘The Wild One.’ So does Stephen Oliver’s music, the jazziest I have heard in a Shakespeare production; the scarifying stage has been reached; Mercutio’s end marks a point of no return. But it’s more or less accidental; it takes Romeo - a self-confessed ‘mad’am’ - to plunge his knife into Tybalt with conscious exultation.

Romeo is to be regarded as a sizeable but unrewarding cross to be chivalrously borne by some actor blessed or cursed with conventional good looks and a pleasing manner. Of late he has emerged as a rewarding character in his own right and the fulcrum of the play. Anton Lesser, physically small, makes him a clever, self-conscious, rather shallow youth with a violent sense of fun. He favours Benvolio with a friendly kick in the shin, and gives as good as he gets in verbal combat with Mercutio.

Juliet’s love brings out the best and the worst in him. Mr Lesser, in like with current practice, gives full value to his screaming self-pity after banishment. This is a risky interpretation, only to be vindicated if the actor can at the end make Romeo grow up. Mr Lesser brings it off; his ‘I defy you, stars,’ rings round the theatre as Shakespearean syllables should and rarely do.

Jonathan Hyde offers a Mercutio high on blood and self-esteem. It fits, and Mr Hyde is an authoritative actor. But I have this old-fashioned ideas that Shakespeare rather liked Mercutio, and meant us to. Actors and directors, though, are nowadays too high-minded to let us. In fact, as Romeo has increased in prestige, Mercutio has declined; so, more surprisingly, has Juliet.

Judy Buxton’s performance is at the moment an accurate but impersonal sketch. Her best moment is her first, gazing gravely at her own reflection before the plot descends on her. There is a determined Tybalt from Chris Hunter and a fine, unfussy Nurse from Brenda Bruce, who makes the advice to marry Paris sound the most logical thing in the world. Jimmy Gardner’s Peter supports her from a world of his own, one adorned by some economical visual gags. The productions grips both as a comment on the play and as a piece of storytelling.