Review: ROMEO AND JULIET, Harold Pinter Theatre

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan

Following his Olivier Award-showered adaptation of Oedipus, director Robert Icke returns to the West End with another updated classic. His new production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which showcases the young talents of Noah Jupe (Hamnet, A Quiet Place Part II) and Sadie Sink (Stranger Things), is fresh, urgent, heart-warming and -breaking in equal measure.

This version of Shakespeare’s revered tragedy trains its focus on Juliet, whose disheveled teenage bed is a recurring centrepiece in the production. Icke dispenses with the original prologue, starting the show with a dream sequence in which sparring Montagues and Capulets stalk around Juliet’s bed. The simmering threat of violence descends into fraught sensuality when the adversaries descend into snogging, at which point Juliet suddenly awakes and the play begins. This opening is just one of many inventive sparks from director Icke which charges this production with vivid, electrical tension. 

Time anxiety is a central theme in Romeo and Juliet, and one notably foregrounded in Baz Luhrmann’s popular and frantic 1996 film adaptation. In Icke’s production, a looming digital clock ticks and jumps and skips through the hours and days, and scenes are overlaid and crushed together, ratcheting up the urgency as the young lovers hurtle towards their doom.

Doom and fate, and how it interacts with choices and time, is tantalisingly toyed with by flashes of alternative timelines that regularly burst through scenes of the play. The audience is agonisingly teased with flickers of hope, with the possibility of a different ending to the tragedy that has been locked inexorably in place for the last 500 years.

Noah Jupe makes a confident West End debut as Romeo, manifesting easy onstage chemistry with all his scene partners. Although his notoriety as the heartsick loverboy isn’t immediately evident at the beginning of the play in his supposed infatuation with Rosaline, by the end of the show Jupe demonstrates an astonishingly violent passion.

Sadie Sink is nothing short of enchanting as Juliet. Bursting with charisma and wit, with giddiness and poignant optimism, Sink is a rare performer and completely unique Juliet.

Kasper Hilton-Hille is another stand-out performance as the outrageous and jibing Mercutio, flinging himself into crude and unruly physical humour. Clare Perkins is also uniquely delightful as Juliet’s cockney nurse – Juliet’s staunch ally and stolid foil to her wilting and broken mother.

Hildegard Bechtler’s set and costume design is strikingly stark, foregrounding characters over setting. Sliding walls and a luminous digital clock are the key set components, giving an unnerving sense of unsettled time and space, of being unable to grasp the present.

This tense, fraught and frequently stark production is punctuated by joy, warmth and humour – powered by the youthful energy of its lead performers. A gem of a show and an inventive and insightful adaptation of a classic.

**** Four Stars

Reviewed by Livvy Perrett

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