Theatre review: Romeo & Juliet (Almeida)

Now pretty firmly established as the Almeida's current big-draw director, Rebecca Frecknall tackles her first Shakespeare at the venue, and goes for one regular readers will both know I rarely get on with. In Romeo & Juliet a gang war between two families has been a blight on Verona for who knows how many years if not centuries. Romeo (Toheeb Jimoh) and Juliet (Isis Hainsworth) are teenagers from opposite sides of the conflict, but when Romeo sneaks into a party at his enemies' home, he and Juliet fall in love at first sight. Aware that their families' feud will forbid any relationship between them, they go for an extreme solution and marry in secret. But the violence affects them directly soon enough, Romeo gets exiled for murdering Juliet's cousin, and their convoluted plots to continue fooling their families end in tragedy.

Of course as well as Shakespeare's version there have been any number of famous adaptations, including the ballet by Prokofiev. One of the most notable elements of Frecknall's production is the way she weaves this music into the play.

So both the scenes of violence and those of celebration break into the music from the ballet, particularly the famous "Dance of the Knights." Sure, it means whenever a character dies they have to mutter "thank you for the opportunity, Lord Sugar" before shuffling offstage, but the dance breaks (I couldn't find a choreographer credited) bring some bursts of violent energy.

In recent years most Shakespeare productions have tried to cast the roles a bit more gender-diverse, but Frecknall has kept very much to the way it's set out in the dramatis personae, with Juliet, her mother (Amanda Bright) and her Nurse (Jo McInnes) the only women. It feels very deliberate, with the women often circled and confronted by men, and even when there's no actual threat implied, it feels like their actions are always conforming to what the men want. Appropriately, given the balletic element, the biggest influence feels like it's Matthew Bourne's career-defining Swan Lake, with its use of dance to convey testosterone-soaked danger.

Outside of music the production feels most defined by the two leads themselves: Jimoh's Romeo sets his stall out early as someone who's cultivated his image as the romantic in love with Rosaline to go against the family obsession with violence he's already world-weary of. Meeting Juliet means these platitudes get put to the test of the real thing. Hainsworth takes her cue from the way Juliet is described as not being out in the world yet - childlike, knock-kneed and awkward, she feels like she's barely been let out of her room before the party, so life comes at her all at once. Yes, this is a production that does see the pair as being genuinely in love, which isn't really how I see it, so that's another point on which it was going to struggle to sell me.

And while I found the stars convincing in their feelings, I could have done with the edit - which has taken the play down to a little over two hours without interval - being even more severe. The dance sequences are used as punctuation and spectacle, and work well in that regard, but I felt they could have been used to speed up the action, replacing some of the more talky scenes with visuals. My biggest frustration with Romeo & Juliet is that for a story that should be hurtling towards its tragic conclusion there's a remarkable lack of urgency. I had high hopes that Frecknall's would be one of those dynamic productions that bucks the trend, but in between eye-catching moments there were still many dialogue-heavy scenes that failed to come to life.

It's a shame because there's some interesting ideas here: There's something about Paul Higgins' Scottish accent that brings an automatic touch of comedy to Friar Lawrence's religious exclamations. Jyuddah Jaymes' Tybalt is less uncontrollable hothead, more of a coiled snake revelling in the prospect of violence. James Cooney's Paris leans more towards him as the man who'll take a teenage girl for his wife regardless of what she may think of the matter than the essentially noble interpretation of the character, while Jack Riddiford's Mercutio is dangerously unpredictable and probably off his face on something or other - this is, when all's said and done, a production that keeps the male characters' dangerous nature barely bubbling under the surface.

Perhaps most interesting among the supporting characters is the attempt to square the circle between Capulet's initial insistence to Paris that Juliet's opinion is paramount in any marriage arrangement, and his eventual violent rejection of her for daring to defy him. In between, we see Jamie Ballard take him through the way Tybalt's death threatens to implode the family: Speeding up the engagement to Paris is his misjudged, desperate attempt to bring some happiness back into his home, and when it fails so spectacularly he cracks completely.

Chloe Lamford's design also largely goes for stark simplicity with the odd moment of audacity: The opening, with the famous prologue projected onto a stone wall, leads into a memorable coup de théâtre to kick the show off with, and a candlelit finale is also visually stunning. But for me these visuals reflect the production as a whole: Some bold ideas are interspersed with too many scenes that play things a bit too straight.

Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare is booking until the 29th of July at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.