Theatre review: Romeo & Juliet(Empire Street Productions / Harold Pinter Theatre)

What if, instead of giving a written instruction to a servant who can't read, you gave it to one who can? If Capulet (Clark Gregg) had handed the invitations to his ball to the Nurse (Clare Perkins,) she could have found the guests herself. Instead the illiterate Peter (Jamie Ankrah) needs help from a stranger in the street, who invites himself along to the party to stalk a girl he fancies. Once there Romeo (Noah Jupe) falls for Capulet's daughter Juliet (Sadie Sink,) who enthusiastically returns his interest. This teenage infatuation is given an entirely unnecessary sense of peril and urgency by the fact that the pair's families have an unexplained, deadly rivalry, leading them into an elopement within hours of their first meeting. A number of other avoidable accidents and violent acts interfere over the next couple of days, and trying to navigate them while keeping their big secret sees the affair end in tragedy.

This Sliding Doors element is one of three high concepts in Robert Icke's production of Romeo & Juliet, which identifies a few such moments along the way, like if Juliet had met her prospective husband Paris (Lewis Shepherd) at the party as planned, if monks were a reliable delivery service, or if Mercutio could shut the fuck up for two minutes.

Hildegard Bechtler's design revolves around Juliet's bed, which doubles as everything from Romeo's bed to their joint tomb. She spends a lot of her time in there and it serves as a focus for a second, similar high concept that sees us let into Juliet's dreams - the opening fight scene between the families is framed as one such dream, ending in the fighting boys about to kiss because evidently, in Juliet's fantasies at least, this rivalry is of the heated variety. It serves as a counterpoint to the theme of tipping point moments elsewhere in the play - if those are the production identifying what could have been averted because we know the story, the dreams are Juliet imagining possibilities. It culminates in a striking fantasy sequence and even an ambiguous element to the ending that Anne Hathaway would have been happy with.

The third big idea comes via Ash J Woodward's video design, in a tweak to Icke's love of countdowns that instead regularly projects the date and time onto the set, focusing on how quickly events turn sour: In this telling the title characters first spot each other in the wee small hours of Monday morning and are both dead by Wednesday night, less than 72 hours later (Icke has moved the discovery of the "dead" Juliet to Wednesday morning, without changing the dialogue that would set it a day later.)

It's largely effective although it does lead to a rare misstep into bathos from the director, when the title characters finally consumate their marriage at the end of what the projections have driven home has been a very eventful Monday, while Giles Thomas' sound design gives us a slow cover of "I Don't Like Mondays." On the other hand it does provide a painfully honest sign of how long it's likely to take a couple of horny teenagers to lose their virginities, as we go into the interval with Romeo and Juliet getting into bed a little after midnight, and rejoin them fast asleep at twenty past.

Regular readers will both know how I feel about this play, particularly about everything that happens from this point on, and which very few productions manage to convince me isn't a very tiny amount of plot being dragged out to breaking point. In a way Icke flips the usual trend: Although not actually dull, I was worried by how the first 90 minutes feel rather flat, with a constant van Hove-style droning sound in the background giving a sense of menace but, ironically given the way the production shows us how quickly things escalate, there isn't the action and pace that tends to liven up this part of the story.

On the other hand the final hour after the interval has benefited from some editing - we still get the Apothecary scene but at least there's no detailed description of his shop - and overlapping of scenes which means I didn't quite get the feeling of the action dragging interminably. Some cuts might have been a step too far, as Sink's Juliet comes round from her fake death with very little emotional reaction to discovering Romeo's very real one. Perhaps it's meant to show how far she now just accepts that the worst will always happen, but it does cap off a fairly cold performance.

Otherwise the leads are decent - Sink is definitely giving a sense of emotional distance that only really thaws at all in Romeo's presence, while Jupe starts off a bit stilted but warms into his performance once the shit really starts to hit the fan and people around him start dying. Despite being one of the most unabliguously glamorous and attractive starcrossed pairs you're likely to see, there's a suggestion that shared social awakwardness is what brings them together: The focus on Juliet's bed reminds us how much time she spends there in isolation and perhaps depression. And it doesn't matter how many hours Romeo clearly spends in the gym, Rosaline won't notice him if he spends an entire party moping in a corner.

He also hangs out with a friend so overpowering he has little chance to develop a personality of his own, and I feel like Icke is with me on how much Mercutio is to blame for what happens to him and everyone else: Kasper Hilton-Hille makes him an unfunny attention-seeker whose comedy stylings mainly consist of showing people his arse, so unable to spend a second not being the centre of attention he deliberately provokes Aruna Jalloh's Tybalt, then spends his dying breath blaming Romeo for a situation he had actually completely defused before Mercutio put his foot in it, and goading him into deadly revenge.

There are moments that feel like missed opportunities: In one of those moments where a line becomes clearer than I've ever noticed it before, Gregg really clarifies the fact that Juliet is an only child because he and his wife lost so many other babies. He's also very clear in his, unusual for the time, insistence that Juliet consent to her own marriage, and I thought we might get some exploration of how Tybalt's death flips a mental switch that makes him and Lady Capulet (Eden Epstein) turn so violently against their daughter. Unfortunately this still plays out as the two of them having a complete character change.

Icke's Romeo & Juliet is frustrating in how it doesn't quite hit the mark, and its multiple high concepts do come up against the common problem of none of them really fulfilling its potential. It never quite tells us what its definitive take on the play is, and the alternate possibilities gimmick is probably only of much use to anyone who already knows the play. It's a fairly humourless approach that only really breaks when Perkins embraces the extent to which the Nurse is essentially a Carry On character, but despite threatening to lose momentum it never quite does, and ends up more watchable than most productions.

Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare is booking until the 20th of June at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.