Robert Icke’s revival of Shakespeare’s most poetic, feverish tragedy has already attracted sniggers for alerting audiences to its themes of grief, revenge and violence.
Quite aside from the fact trigger warnings pretty much provide a basic plot synopsis when it comes to Shakespeare, such unsophisticated infantilising of the audience is at odds with the tenor of Icke’s production. Romeo and Juliet is, of course, a play about the intoxication and madness of adolescent love.
With Noah Jupe (of recent Hamnet fame) and Sadie Sink, of Stranger Things, in the title roles, Icke’s production undeniably plays to its youthful star-dusted cast, yet it also has a near metaphysical preoccupation with the vagaries of time that lends this most callow of stories a rare gravitas.
Icke aficionados will recognise many of the director’s ticks – the digital clock that intermittently counts down the play’s inexorable five-day time frame, the slow-burn naturalism, the uncanny use of music to shift the mood on a sixpence.
Yet it’s the lead performances that matter here, most notably Sink in her first Shakespearean role and who is so commanding she makes this Juliet’s story much more than it is Romeo’s. Sink is an actress who seems to live off her nerves, every sinew seemingly a quiver, but she brings a quicksilver intelligence to Juliet, thoughts forming almost more quickly than she can voice them, and leading Jupe’s significantly more naïve-seeming Romeo, rather than the other way round. Moreover, she burns as an adolescent girl in love. Her delirious, incredulous ecstasy after Romeo proposes is so absolutely right it almost made me cry.
As he did in his 2012 production of the same play, Icke repeatedly alerts the audience to the plot’s fateful reliance on chance, here replaying the odd key scene with different split-second timings: a sudden look thrown in the right direction at the right moment, an argument averted, or ignited.
At the same time, the pace is claustrophobically, at times even exquisitely slow. Scenes are composed with a cinéaste’s precision – amid the jagged hedonism of a party, a waiter drags a bin bag across the floor.
The supporting cast is similarly detailed – Kasper Hilton Hille’s court jester Mercutio, radiating reckless, unhinged charisma; Clark Gregg’s agonised paternalistic Capulet.
It’s a richly rewarding evening, with the final scene – so often played as a ghastly melodrama – bringing the theme of different lives hovering just out of reach full circle.
Until Jun 20. atgtickets.com