“Is love kind?” Romeo asks his and Juliet’s names early in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Not so much, according to Romeo and Juliet, a raw and charming new production that opened Wednesday here at the Almeida Theater.
No wonder the courtship between noble Romeo (here played by Ted Lasso’s sweet-faced Theeb Zimaud) and teenage Juliet ends in disaster. But Rebecca Frecknall (a controversial British director who tends to take Olivier Awards for her work) makes this all-too-familiar play feel like something entirely new. and the results are astonishing.
Flecknall finalizes the text for nearly an hour to really equate to the choir’s promised “two-hour traffic on stage,” with the same leanness and scalpel-sharp precision as a professional. First brought to Shakespeare. Tennessee Williams is rumored to be heading to New York next spring for her ongoing West End revival of “Cabaret.”
Her Romeo and Juliet, which runs without intermission, begins with the cast frenziedly clinging to the stage wall before the key lines of the prologue are projected. But as if rushing to the heart of the play, the walls soon collapse, revealing the citizens of Verona during the battle. The danger is felt from the start, in a contemporary setting where Juliet is described by her father as “an outsider in the world.” Maybe it’s because she hasn’t gone through the hardships of her life yet. Such recognition will come over time and how.
“These violent pleasures have violent endings,” notes Friar Lawrence (excellent Paul Higgins), perhaps the most prescient remark in the play. Romeo and Juliet have just appeared and their existence seems threatened at every turn. At one point, a nurse (Joe McInnes in her boots, an excellent director herself) sits with her hands over her face, fearing the worst.
Elsewhere, Juliet’s father says to his daughter’s purpose, Paris, that “we were born to die,” a comment that has prophetic power in this context. Jamie Ballard infuriates Lord Capulet enough to catch even his own wife off guard. Will he have a father who mocks his only child as “one too many”?
In such a toxic family, it’s easy to imagine Juliet wanting a shortcut. Frecknall makes us aware of how the play lives through the passage of time. “Tomorrow is Wednesday,” said the monk as he passed by, pointing out the unrelenting speed that surprised everyone. Monks are equally wary of the dangers inherent in such haste. “Those who run fast stumble,” he warns as his lovers charge into the abyss.
Flecknall has an athletic background, and her “Romeo and Juliet” often feels half-baked for dance theater, including liberally borrowing from Prokofiev’s famous ballet music just for this play.
The male ensemble, including key characters such as Benvolio (Miles Barrow) and Judda James’ feral Tybalt, moves in a rolling rhythm that falls to the floor of Chloe Langford’s set and rises again. Jonathan Holby’s combat rendition introduces guns into the knife arsenal and eliminates the charismatic Mercutio played by Jack Liddiford. Here, she’s an arrogant provocateur who disappears after barely speaking Queen Mab’s speech. With the rules governing this terrifying group of men, no one is safe in the relatively merciless glare of Lee Karan’s row of lights moving toward the back of the stage.
A 2022 Emmy nominee and a fast-growing actor, Jimo brings to the stage the instantly likable personality he’s known for his role as Sam Obisanya in Ted Lasso. What’s surprising here is how easily he opens up emotionally to Juliet, but realizes too late that the options available to this couple are running out. Also interesting is the reconstruction of the balcony scene, which reverses the play’s iconic image of Romeo sitting on a ladder and speaking to Juliet in the middle of the stage.
Jimo’s Romeo, referring to “this world-weary flesh,” sounds like an unborn Hamlet. Haynesworth played Hermia, a young lover with an equally unforgiving father, in The Bridge Theater’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream a few years ago. Juliet is a much bigger role, and the actress sometimes disappears into the grief of her role, her words themselves becoming muddy or lost. (Hainsworth will reunite with Frecknall in an adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba, which hits the National Theater in November.)
But when Hainsworth’s hoarse grief turned into a surprisingly raw suicide, and there was a scene where some of the audience around me visibly flinched, I’ve seldom heard a more enthusiastic audience than Almeida. do not have.
It may not surprise you to learn that Frecknall closed the play with Juliette’s desperate act. After restoring the thorns of death, all that remains is silence.
Romeo and Juliet
Until July 29th at the Almeida Theater in London. https://Almeida.co.uk/
