Romeo and Juliet production image. Photo by Charlie FlintThe star-crossed lovers from Verona’s opposing adversarial houses of Montague and Capulet, have been relocated to a modern East London setting in this tweaked and truncated retelling. By adapting The Bard’s original text, Kwame Owusu has developed a play with a punchy 90minute running time which eschews much of the earnestness and protracted hand wringing usually present in productions of Romeo and Juliet. To break the dialogue still further, the show also includes several hip-hop street dance routines executed by most members of the company, which serve to punctuate the text with vibrant and visually arresting moments.
Retained for the purposes of scene setting, the role of Chorus here falls to a young DJ (Louise Rowe) and whilst the flow and rhythm of the star-cross’d lovers speech wasn’t necessarily fully realised, this could largely be attributed to a plethora of distracting patrons belatedly taking their seats, which caused considerable disruption during the first 10 minutes of press night. Oddly, in some ways, the noticeable hubbub added an air of informality and general connectedness to the boisterous events unfolding onstage.
Co-directed by Emily Ling Williams and Malik Nashad Sharpe, the sense of community and inclusion shone bright, reminding patrons that assembling, rehearsing and marshalling a large cast of eager but largely unprofessional performers into a unified whole, is no small task. In the main, the end result was surprisingly effective with Dhruv Bhudia and Shakira Paulas in the title roles generating the necessary chemistry, whilst others like Natasha Lewis (a formidable Lady Capulet) exhibited the sort of commanding stage presence which surreptitiously guides and leads less experienced members of the cast. Others who made the most of their supporting parts included Joy Adeogun who demonstrated a burgeoning natural talent for comedy as Jess, and Oliver Pritchard whose gawky fan-holding stooge nearly stole an entire scene.
It’s not possible to single out every contribution in a cast of nearly 40 performers, but particular mention should go to the pair who periodically danced the inner Romeo and Juliet roles, Louis Donovan and Praeploy Pam Tomuan. Their nimble and ethereal lift-work added genuinely beautiful moments to a production whose main focus was energy and vibrancy.
Liam Bunster is credited with set and costume and deployed a sectioned box design with sliding shutters to contain and demarcate sections of the play including those conducted in shops and a café/club snazzily dubbed Caps. Another notable change, was the swapping of rapiers for knives in the initial fight sequence, which added a poignant observation about the prevalence of hot-headed knife crime in the capital and married it neatly to the onstage tragedy.
The short run of ROMEO & JULIET continues at Stratford East until Saturday 9th August.
