Romeo & Juliet (Harold Pinter Theatre, London) until June 20, 2hrs 55mins
By Robert Gore-Langton
Romeo And Juliet stars two young leads: Sadie Sink, star of Netflix’s Stranger Things, and British actor Noah Jupe, who appears as Hamlet at the end of the film Hamnet – a film that, irritatingly, has got away with its portrayal of William Shakespeare as a total moron.
The star-cross’d lovers are both achingly young. That’s as it should be. In Victorian days, Juliets were often plain and middle-aged in order to make Romeo – a vanity role for old hams – look less over the hill.
But here the couple’s lack of experience shows. Ms Sink uses jazz hands and windmilling arms to articulate every sentence, and both of the lovers chop up the verse into staccato gobbets of lifeless language.
The effect is a veneer of emotional earnestness rather than anything really in the moment. It’s no pleasure to listen to.
Leading the cast of Romeo and Juliet at the Harold Pinter Theatre is Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink and British actor Noah Jupe
Robert Gore-Langton highlights the pair’s ‘lack of experience’, penning: ‘Ms Sink uses jazz hands and windmilling arms to articulate every sentence, and both of the lovers chop up the verse into staccato gobbets of lifeless language’
Director Robert Icke’s love of gimmicks makes the evening a frightful palaver. Do we need a cover of I Don’t Like Mondays?
There’s dazzling lighting (migraine sufferers beware) and ambient music, plus a digital clock giving a time-bomb urgency to the proceedings.
But in fact ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’ (from the cut prologue) is now almost three hours. That’s because we have to endure bizarre action replays of some exchanges – the visual equivalent of a repeating burp you can get from home brew.
Jupe’s sweet, tousled Romeo is upstaged by his mooning pal Mercutio (Kasper Hilton-Hille). A highlight is the latter’s famous Queen Mab speech, faces lit by torches in the dark, like an Old Master canvas.
When the couple (spoiler alert) die in the tomb, you get a living family album of their snuffed-out future lives. Great idea – but it comes after a long old slog.
It’s an evening that, I’m afraid, will baffle the cast’s young fans who may be new to The Bard.
By Patrick Marmion
There’s a good chance that any story centred on what looks like Tracey Emin’s infamous unmade bed will end badly. The fact that it’s the tale of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, makes it tragedy crossed with Turner Prize aesthetics. And with Juliet played by Sadie Sink, the militant teenager Max from Netflix’s Stranger Things, it’s a potentially lethal cocktail.
Robert Icke’s doom-laden production goes further, adding a touch of the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors. With Juliet’s Emin-esque bed rolling to and fro through a set of… sliding doors.
Digital clocks remind us of every second of the play’s three hours (so much for the Bard’s ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’). The idea, I suppose, is to make the story feel like a nightmare of bad timing. It succeeds.
Patrick Marmion pens: ‘Sink makes a frenetic, sometimes screeching, but reliably lovestruck pairing with Noah Jupe (who was Hamlet in the film Hamnet) as her Romeo’
Juliet’s Capulet family are presented as wealthy American emigres, pitched against the Anglo-Saxon Montagues (another special relationship gone sour). Like most Juliets, by virtue of their youth, Sink is in at the deep end with the Elizabethan verse. To her credit, she speaks it well. Unfortunately, though, it’s also a performance full of vigorous gesticulation – as if she’s conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Fifth.
Stuck in her PJs for much of the time, Sink makes a frenetic, sometimes screeching, but reliably lovestruck pairing with Noah Jupe (who was Hamlet in the film Hamnet) as her Romeo.
Unusually, he is the relatively calm half of the ill-fated duo. Well-mannered, not unduly excitable, moderately amusing and unarguably cute, no parent would be disappointed to find him sitting at their dinner table.
Icke’s production is intermittently revelatory, yet also oddly obstructive: a sunless vision of fair Verona with an almost constant backing track you’d normally associate with an aromatherapy massage at a posh spa.
Blinding lights flash to cue Sliding Doors style re-runs of decisive moments – to show how things could have been. Regrettably, the closing vision of our lovers glimpsing the life they might have led is like a TikTok meme, set to Adrianne Lenker’s song Not A Lot, Just Forever.
For all the gimmicks, and in spite of a naff voiceover sounding like a newsreader speaking from Juliet’s bedside alarm clock, the show is remarkably consistent and even engrossing.
Clare Perkins adds a touch of EastEnders as Juliet’s nurse, and Kasper Hilton-Hille as Romeo’s troublemaking friend Mercutio swaggers and moons like a Trustafarian wastrel.
Best supporting actor goes to Clark Gregg, who brings clarity and purpose as Juliet’s father. They could all learn something from him, but when did teenagers ever listen to their parents?
Romeo & Juliet runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre until June 20.
