Hainsworth is guilty of this: though her fury, as a caged adolescent daughter, makes sense, you long earlier for touches of the quiet intimacy into which she finally settles. Some of Miles Barrow’s speech as Benvolio vanishes in gabble. Sound invades and betrays: a mic can catch the tiniest crack in a voice and a tale Sergei Prokofiev’s music for the ballet, threaded (sometimes too emphatically) through the action, conjures up nightmare characters dance to it, crouched over like beasts, and sink to the floor as if pulled by the scruffs of their necks. Lee Curran’s lighting streaks the bare stage with shadows when at the end the ground is stacked with candles and the stage golden with lights, it is as if the lovers have indeed been cut out into stars. He concludes with a lovely muddle: “It is so very late that we/ May call it early by and by.” Juliet’s father (an explosively bullying Jamie Ballard) gets in a dither, first about what day of the week it is and then about the hour. It is not only that the lovers ask whether they are woken by nightingale or lark. I have never before realised how many characters don’t know the time of day. Dream tangles with the action, takes away certainties. Riddiford – writhing, taunting, cajoling, enticing – is the quintessence of a dangerous friend, himself half hobgoblin: his description of hazelnut carriages shook amazed laughter from the press night audience. Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech – brilliantly delivered by Jack Riddiford, irradiates the evening. This is an evening of speed and secrets in the half light.
They are the magnetic centre but they are not the whole story.
Out of control, not always lucid, compulsively drawn together. Two beacons at the centre.Īs Romeo and Juliet, Toheeb Jimoh and Isis Hainsworth are radiant and desperate. No healing at the end vibrancy throughout. The director, who recently stripped back Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, has now staged Shakespeare’s most famous love story as an unsparing tragedy. Rebecca Frecknall has again gone to the heart of the matter.
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