The last time I saw Romeo and Juliet in Oxford, I was in it: 1984, at the Catholic Chaplaincy on St Aldates. Unlike Peter Sutton's beautifully restrained interpretation for the Jesus College Shakespeare Project, ours was wild and violent - basically a series of rolling street fights between rival mobs of troublesome Italian ultras. During the dress rehearsal I was actually knocked unconscious by a scrawny second-year mathematician who is now the Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. I woke up in the Radcliffe Infirmary with a doctor tickling the soles of my feet and saying, 'Can you feel this?'
All of which goes to show that directorial caprice can be a dangerous thing.
For this production, the latest in Jesus College's thirteen-year quest to perform all Shakespeare's plays in order of composition, Sutton has taken the remarkable, almost unprecedented, step of avoiding any sort of 'angle' on the play at all. It's not set in a sink housing estate, it doesn't impose a retrofitted homosexual subtext (well maybe it does, a bit), and it doesn't even give house-room to the by-now-standard reading of the ending as being an immediate return to the inescapable cycle of vendettas that have dogged the Capulet and Montague families for so long.
Instead, this production hands responsibility for the play's meaning to William Shakespeare.
This is both brave and powerful.
Brave, because it's risky. A directorial 'take' gives audiences a ready-made portal into the world of the play, and it allows the company to show off their originality and creativity (unless of course your originality consists, as it did for Sir Ken Branagh in 2016, of casting the 82-year-old Derek Jacobi as Mercutio and allowing him to say 'Boom boom' at the end of all his lines. After the fifth time I was ready to jump on the stage with a gag. Or a mallet). Without an angle, they are vulnerable and exposed, the only thing covering their metaphorical nakedness being the flimsy fig leaf of a few iambic pentameters.
And powerful, because, as it turns out, Romeo and Juliet works extremely well if you trust the lines. This cast trusts them, understands them, and delivers them with all the emphasis and character they merit – no more and no less. So Lam Guanxiong as Friar Laurence, for example, doesn’t add any comedic bumbling or schoolmasterly finger-wagging to his ghostly father role. He speaks the lines as written, and as a result, as if by magic, a three-dimensional person is gradually etched into view, a living statue hewn from the rock of unadulterated language. Lydia Free as the Nurse finds in the lines, rather than the usual sub-panto-dame burlesque associated with the character, a kinship with her mistress that turns them into true mutual confidantes. Her simple line, ‘I think it best you married with the County’ comes across as the supreme tragic betrayal, the moment when the adult world finally abandons Juliet to her fate. Ollie Gillam, as the abusive father Capulet, starts out almost deadpan in his determination to deliver the lines unencumbered by the baggage of interpretation, but by the time we reach the domestic hell of Act Three, and witness him threatening to drag his weeping daughter to her wedding on an executioner’s rack, no play-acting could match the naked cruelty of this tyrannical father’s words. ‘My fingers itch’. Best leave it at that.
Juliet is however the emotional and intellectual heart of this play: the only character (with the possible exception of Benvolio) who displays common sense, moral purpose and a mature understanding of love. Not bad for a thirteen-year-old. And Emily Polhill, building on her apprentice role last term as Jaquenetta in Love’s Labour’s Lost, delivers a virtuoso rendition. Sticking with absolute conviction to the lines-first policy of the production, she enables Juliet to ride the tidal wave of experience that lifts and ultimately engulfs her over the four-days’ running time of the story. Jesus dining hall is the ideal space for this: a bare but genuinely historic setting unstifled by such ephemeral trivialities as stage lighting or scenery. We the audience, ranged on benches, looking inwards from the opposing walls of the room, can see not just the young lovers gripped in the thrall of teenage passion, but also, in the background, each other. To watch Juliet yearning ‘Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night’ to a backdrop of women with tears trickling down their cheeks somehow universalises the entire experience of the play. Productions come and go, but the words stay in your heart for ever.
Compared to Juliet’s wisdom and emotional depth, Romeo has always been a bit gullible and shallow. He wants it all, and he wants it now. Well, girls mature earlier than boys, don’t they? Callum Beardmore embodies Romeo’s brashness with operatic swagger. He’s permanently on a hair-trigger, like an Elizabethan version of the Hulk and Bruce Banner. He fights, he shouts, he loves. When he kills Tybalt, he stabs him with such a prodigious upward swing of the arm that Gilon Fox is literally airborne for a moment before crumpling dead on the ground. Beardmore’s ferocity possibly pushes into the red on the thespian Richter scale, but he balances the anger with some truly tender moments. The lovers’ wedding night, rendered in a simple, almost balletic dumb show, is a moment of symbolic but unmistakeable sexuality, and a tribute to Sophie Cooch’s sensitive intimacy direction.
For a production so dedicated to the metre, meaning and might of Shakespeare’s words, there was one alteration that I found puzzling: Paris, on being told by Capulet that his daughter is not yet fourteen, and it might be a good idea to wait a year or two before deflowering her, is supposed to reply (pretty revoltingly), ‘Younger than she are happy mothers made’. But this has been changed to ‘Elder than she are happy mothers made’. Doesn’t make sense!
This Romeo and Juliet takes a while to get going. Even the opening brawl, often an occasion for a street fight of West Side Story proportions, barely gets beyond verbal fisticuffs and the biting of a piss-soaked thumb. But stick with it. That stripped-back style is a by-product of the intentional bareness of its vision, and the foregrounding of some of the most beautiful love poetry ever written. This is not just a night for Shakespeare’s young lovers. It’s a night for all Shakespeare lovers.