GUARDIAN 16.4.87 Nicholas de Jongh
Michael Bogdanov's revival of Romeo and Juliet, first seen last
spring in Stratford, is an astounding set of conjurer's tricks
which obliterates Shakespeare's Verona and whisks the play into
a high-technology post-dolce-vita Italy, where electric guitars,
a real red sports car, a marble-topped desk and a priest on a
motorbike are the signs or icons of the times.
The prince, who seems more mafiosi than regal, and a big-business
vulgar Capulet, or a villainous drugs dealer replacing the apothecary,
suggest the quality of the thoroughly modern society in which
Romeo and Juliet go down.
The production therefore can be seen as a series of short, sharp shocks by which tradition is overthrown - sometimes with those extraneous dollops of comedy which suggest that inside Bogdanov something quite vulgar is struggling to get out and succeeding.
Yet you cannot deny the revival's abounding sense of excitement
and vitality, it's a high bid for young audiences, for whom Shakespeare
is normally the sound of boredom. It sometimes seems as if Bogdanov
is trying to go the way of West Side Story, but at least his production
is underpinned by an idea. Bogdanov's version emphasises how much
erotic love is still subordinated to family concepts of materialism
and status.
The raw comedy of this society is chiefly visual, sometimes tangential,
with public display or joyfulness running in counterpoint to private
grief: the banished Romeo is caught up in a carnival procession
and a wedding band salutes the dead Juliet; the partygoers at
the Capulet feast, who plunge fully-clothed into a pool, and a
Benvolio swigging alka seltzer in the piazza after the party,
show up hedonism at play.
And the concluding tableau, an interpolated funeral service with
the lovers now commemorated by gold statues, makes a final dramatic
point.
But there are doubts as well. Chris Dyer's stage design, a bare
marble
piazza with statue and pillars and a backdrop for brlown-up black
and white montage photographs, is indelibly Italian yet the cast
are thoroughly Anglo-Saxon, lacking Italianate temperament. The
production is also far happier with scenes of large scale communality,
and misses the rising passion of the two lovers.
But these public scenes work quite brilliantly. I have never seen
the brawl in which Mercutio is killed so dynamically staged. Tybalt's
arrival in the red sports car precipitates a battle of knives
and chains and strangleholds. And Sean Bean's Romeo reacts to
death in a sudden electrifying crescendo of energy, spreadeagling
Mercutio upon his cherished car and stabbing him to a nasty death.
You may wonder what the working classes
are doing with such demotic
implements but there is no doubting the craft with which they
are wielded. On the other hand Bogdanov is less easy with the
play's intimate scenes of revelation and desire. Sean Bean's blond
muscular Romeo is at first most suitably the epitome of slow,
simpleminded diffidence, but when love breaks he is quite underwhelmed.
Similarly Niamh Cusack's Juliet looks all flaming and modestly
voluptuous in red, but maintains an obstinate calm, even on that
snatched night when the lovers keep their cool and, surprisingly,
their clothes.
The play's chief antidotes to romanticism, Michael Kitchen's alcoholic
Mercutio, obviously infatuated with Romeo, or Dilys Laye's genteel
Nurse are curiously muted. And it is Hugh Quarshie's pantherlike
Tybalt, vibrating with danger, who provides the right kind of
exhilaration and passion. This is a revival to draw the young.