The well-trodden tragedy of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers gets a new home amid London’s youth violence gang culture in this bold and punchy revival.
As part of Shakespeare Globe’s long-running Deutsche Bank partnership aimed at providing access to theatre for school groups, this version of Romeo and Juliet is very clearly aimed at a teenage audience, yet Lucy Cuthbertson’s production, first staged in 2024, homes in on its London-based audience to make a wider comment on knife crime and gang culture, to success.
Hayden Mampasi (Romeo) and Felixe Forde (Juliet) are the fated teenage couple, brought together by fate. The pair works well together here to quickly establish the union between their characters, brought about at breakneck speed by the brevity of this version (clocking just 90 minutes, but that’s no bad thing). Mampasi’s Romeo is fiery and impulsive, while Forde’s Juliet is desperate and heartbroken. The characterisation is obvious rather than subtle, but it works with this particular imagining of Shakespeare’s work, and plays well to the target audience.
The production’s reimagining of the centre of London gang violence among teens is a deft touch, which mostly lands. Marième Diouf’s meddling Friar also runs a community garden, while the death of the terrifically flamboyant Mercutio (Keanu Adolphus Johnson) is flouted by rival gangs on social media. It is a recognisable setup clearly aimed at the young audience, though some of the reworking falls a bit awry. Miriam Grace Edwards’ Nurse, for example, is now a paramedic, which makes her constant lounging in the Capulet household out of place, while Owen Gawthorpe’s BMX-wielding cyclist does plenty of tricks, but this does pull away from the dialogue, with the cast pushing on regardless of noisy audience responses.
There are some wavering moments, though. A fever dream of a scene where Juliet’s pre-potion nightmare takes hold is utterly baffling and, with a gyrating stripper Paris (Simeon Desvignes), a bit crass too. This feels completely out of context with what the rest of the piece is trying to achieve, taking audiences out of Juliet’s moments of choice at a point in the production when there are few other pauses for reflection.
Even so, the waving of knives is terrifying, the stage combat well-crafted, and the terrific horror of the characters around the laid flower memorials of slain characters, amid scattered graffiti tags scrawled all over the theatre are effective, with the modernisation of the story reigniting the older language with great clarity.
This review was originally written for The Reviews Hub: https://www.thereviewshub.com/26-romeo-and-juliet-shakespeares-globe-london-2/
