BWW Reviews: ROMEO AND JULIET, Pleasance Theatre, April 24 2014

What will the Daily Mail make of it? Underage sex, gang murders, drugs... and poetry. If the passage of years and Shakespeare's iconic status (not many Englishmen have their 450th birthday celebrated with quite the fanfare his received on Wednesday) have served to blunt some of the power of his works through their familiarity (that baldy guy in the picture can't be scary, can he?), then Blue Crate Theatre's pared back Romeo and Juliet makes us think again.

They do so by placing the action on a stark, sepulchral stage; just white bricks, the actors and us. Even the knives and potions that take the young lives are to be imagined, the only props the red cords that bind and divide. Time, language, location slip away and we are, at no distance in the Pleasance Theatre's studio space, drawn, almost literally as much as metaphorically, into the courting, conflict and (ultimately) conciliation.

If the immediacy of the production is its strength, its weakness - as is often the case in fringe Shakespeare - is its unwillingness to let the poetry breathe. People don't talk in blank verse the way they talk in normal discourse, so slowing the speech down does not harm the play's narrative - it's already artifice piled on artifice. Of course passions run high from first to last - it's Romeo and Juliet, after all - but spoken loudly, the words are diminished and not enhanced.

The seven actors are visible all the time, a pleasing device that underlines the claustrophobic, febrile atmosphere of Verona. Oliver Lynes' Romeo works well with Lorna Jinks' Juliet in a balcony scene that is staged side-by-side, emphasising just how close they are, though separated by their families' feuding. Of the multi-role playing support cast, Yvonne Martin stands out as Nurse, apparently parachuted in from a Lionel Bart musical, and I enjoyed Cameron Harle's camp Paris very much.

Black box theatre is at its best when the words and the acting conspire with the audience to live in a make-believe world for a couple of hours. This production largely achieves that - and, with a little more patience in letting the words stand for themselves, the seven actors would bring the full power of Shakespeare's crushing tragedy to bear.

Romeo and Juliet continues at the Pleasance Theatre London until 4 May.

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