Young Lovers of Verona

Romeo and Juliet
The National Theatre
The Observer

Last week I saw a junior delegation from the National Theatre performing Romeo and Juliet in Harrowgate. This week they will be at it in Ilminster and Exeter; and subsequently elsewhere.

Most of the young sprigs involver were first seen at the Old Vic this year in The Tempest as strange, and generally hideous Shapes. There were first heart- at some length- in Spring Awakening; having mutely supported their elders in Shakespeare, they were supported by them in Wedekind’s tragedy of maimed adolescence. In Romeo, most of the senior actors have vanished entirely. Here finally is the teen-and-twenty Verona for which the times so obviously clamour.

Hello, young lovers, you’re all under age, 
And few of you are alive,
Wedekind only killed two of his kids;
Shakespeare has finished off five.
(Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris: count ‘em.)

Well, the National have all these youngsters around; they made an uneven showing in Spring Awakening, but several of them are known to be talented, and there are not many plays in the repertoire to suit them. Have we not always known Romeo to be a tragedy nearly of youth but of childhood, and have we not always lamented the maturity which our theatre has habitually lavished on it unasked? It seems, though, that we overlooked something. Consider. 

‘Younger than you’, says Lady Capulet, urging her 13-year-old on to the dance floor and into the marriage bed, are made already mothers.’ The statistics of teenage maternity may be soaring but we have still to recapture that degree of social tolerance; not merely tolerance, but endorsement. Shakespeare emphasizes Juliet’s age at her first appearance, and then drops the subject. He does not seem to have felt it to be too much of an issue. But the precocious casting of Bill Bryden’s production makes it the issue. 

We are well aware that Veronica Quilligan, who plays Juliet here (and there, and everywhere, this being a Mobile Production), is a credible 13; indeed, in a kindly light she might pass for 12. So we become preoccupied less with the depth of Juliet’s passion than with its piquancy; the more so since piquancy seems at this moment all that Miss Quilligan has to offer. Taking the production on its own terms we can agree that she looks right: gleeful or apprehensive as required. But, if we are concerned with naturalistic consistency, she would also have to sound right; and in fact she stresses nearly every line wrong, Some she stresses not at all; they slide uninflected into the wings. 

I am not insisting on verbal music. Peter Firth, who plays Romeo, is no great melodist either, but he displays a startling ability to weight the words so that they will support a characterization. (I call it startling since I am one of those who sneakily doubted Mr Firth’s ability he showed in Equus. A year from now I shall probably feel similarly shamefaced about Miss Quilligan.) He comes upon the scene a sulky self-absorbed 16. When he asks, ‘Is the day so young?’ he is believably indeed archetypally, the adolescent who doesn’t know what time it is. For much of the play he remains the ‘boy’ of Tybalt’s taunt; never more so than when hounding his tormentor to death. He is called ‘man’ by those who wish to stand well with him (his chums Mercutio and Benvolio, with their own insecure pretensions to maturity) or to shame him out of himself; this is the tactic of the Nurse and Friday when faced with the ground-battering hysteria that follows his banishment, an hysteria explicitly demanded by the text, shirked or muffed by most actors, but enthusiastically rendered by Mr Firth. He gives us some taste of his manhood early on- notably in his foreboding on the way to the ball- and attains it where he should, in his defiance of the stars.

Good Romeos are rare; and here at least Mr Bryden’s emphasis on adolescence has paid off. His intelligence is never in doubt; he frequently illuminates the text, though he rarely sparks it. Marginal benefits in an uncomfortably raw cast are Gerard Ryder’s resentful clown and pleasantly embarrassed Benvolio from Michael Kitchen (who takes over as Romeo in September as Mr Firth goes to Broadway for the re-mounting of Equus); major ones are Peter Needham’s magisterial Friar, and Beryl Reid’s slow, sly Nurse.