The Royal Shakespeare Company are back in their North East home with a production of Romeo and Juliet fit for the 21st Century. David Whetstone went along to see it.
It’s nearly seven years since a statue of Mercutio – voted the North East’s favourite Shakespeare character – was unveiled in the grand circle bar of the Theatre Royal.
The world seems to have moved on a lot since then, for better and worse, and this latest RSC Romeo and Juliet reflects that in many ways.
Though often cited to conjure romance – “he’s such a Romeo” – Shakespeare’s famous play is in fact a tragedy of unintended consequences with misguided young lives senselessly cut short.
RSC deputy director Erica Whyman, who ran Northern Stage in Newcastle for seven years, is bang on with her exciting and imaginative production.
The story of the lovers from rival tribes, the Montagues and the Capulets, lends itself perfectly to the horrific recent surge in knife crime. Tybalt fatally stabs Mercutio and suffers the same fate at the hands of a vengeful Romeo.
You could sigh and say twas ever thus but there’s a vibe about this telling of the tale that plants it firmly in the here and now.
It begins with the edgy young rivals in their skinny jeans – the crowd augmented by girls from the Sacred Heart Catholic High School in Fenham – talking all at once over a pulsating beat.
A set dominated by a metal cube, which can be rotated on a pivot, serves for all scenes, including formal and domestic, but the overriding impression is of inner city grunge.
A multi-ethnic cast mirrors modern urban Britain and the current debate about gender identification is there also. Mercutio in this telling is a woman, played by the sinuous Charlotte Josephine, while an actress, Beth Cordingly, is cast as Escalus, Prince of Verona.
Michael Hodgson, one of the North East’s finest actors, represents old school patriarchy as Capulet, snarling as he roughly manhandles daughter Juliet towards marriage to Paris.
A modern audience full of young women won’t lightly tolerate this sort of bullying, of course.
An early reference to women as the “weaker vessels” elicits an indignant gasp. And when Prince Escalus spits “You men, you beasts”, it seems apt that he is, of course, a she.
Poor Juliet, a character of an earlier time, won’t tolerate an arranged marriage either but the only girl power available to her is to remove herself from the frame – first pretending to die and then actually dying for love.
There are drugs, too, in Romeo and Juliet, supplied by the apothecary to fake a death and then to bring one about.
Scottish actress Karen Fishwick is very good as Juliet, not fey but plausibly smitten by Romeo and determined to follow her heart, even if he is one of the despised Montagues and has killed her cousin.
You might recall Karen. Last time on Tyneside she was turning the air blue in Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, albeit playing Kay, the ‘posh’ one who played the cello, in Lee Hall’s play about a school not at all like Sacred Heart in Fenham.
Her Romeo is British Asian actor Bally Gill, a handsome fellow with a twinkle in his eye. You can see why a teenage girl would defy her dad and down a dodgy sleeping potion for him.
All in all, then, a thoroughly watchable Romeo and Juliet – current, action-packed and likely to appeal both to those who’ve seen a few and those students who want a memorable account to bring the text alive.
Still no happy ending, though.
Romeo and Juliet, Royal Shakespeare Company plays Newcastle Theatre Royal until Saturday, February 9. For tickets, visit www.theatreroyal.co.uk