[In the following review, Duncan-Jones critiques the National Theatre's “Ensemble” production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Tim Supple, noting that the depiction of the two households as racially different had little effect except to generate some confusion and throw an otherwise well-constructed play “off balance.” Additionally, Duncan-Jones praises the efforts of the actors playing the title roles, but comments that Patrick O'Kane's portrayal of Mercutio was weak.]

I have always wondered whether a Romeo and Juliet in which the play's “two households” were shown as racially different would gain huge power for a modern British audience. In the National Theatre's “Ensemble” production, directed by Tim Supple, the experiment is tried, though perhaps a little half-heartedly. The Montagues are black, as is the Prince (Victor Power). Some minor performances are effectively defamiliarized, such as the extravagantly physical grief of Susan Aderin's Lady Montague for Mercutio, supposedly kinsman both to the Prince and the Montagues. However, confusingly, Mercutio himself is not black, but Irish. Patrick O'Kane is the most tiresomely posturing and solipsistic Mercutio I have ever seen. Nothing in his performance becomes him so much as his angry, protracted death, which, like all the deaths, is performed with painfully writhing conviction. But rather than feeling that an enjoyably entertaining voice has been silenced, audiences are likely to experience considerable relief at Mercutio's death, especially since his teasing of Romeo has always seemed barbed and contemptuous rather than affectionate. Perhaps racial difference from the rest of the young Montagues put O'Kane's Mercutio at a disadvantage. Certainly he has never seemed at all comfortable in their company. Nor has the homoerotic interpretation made fashionable by Baz Luhrmann's film been pursued, though much Luhrmann influence can be spotted elsewhere in this altogether very derivative production.

The racial differentiation of the Capulets and Montagues turns out to throw this well constructed play badly off balance. Their “ancient grudge” no longer looks like pointless prolonged feuding between families whose culture and ambitions are identical, for it appears to derive from antagonisms between races that are all too recognizable, and recognizably intransigent. It is difficult to credit Old Capulet's benevolent tolerance of the gatecrashing Romeo, his dreadlocks glimpsed behind his mask, as a “virtuous and well-govern'd youth”, especially since the excellent Ronald Pickup—who almost uniquely in this production knows how to deliver Shakespeare's verse—eventually develops into an alarming psychotic. Nor can we be easily persuaded that, if everything had turned out differently, these grieving fathers would have come to rejoice in their children's mixed-race union. Yet Shakespeare's text—treated with more respect here than in Michael Boyd's current RSC production—in practice compels us to view the “two households” in a colour-blind way, as when, for instance, the Nurse (a first-rate performance by Beverley Klein) shifts from praising (black) Romeo's manly beauty to praising that of (white) Paris, since no words or lines suggest any particular physical difference between Romeo and Paris. Indeed, like Lysander and Demetrius in the closely associated Midsummer Night's Dream, the young men can almost be played as twins, distinguished only by the eye of love. In practice, the NT's bold decision to attempt different-race casting has surprisingly little effect, and such effect as it does have is more often confusing than clarifying.

The production is full of other details which have not been thought through. It mimics Luhrmann's over-the-top brashness, but lacks his vision and stylishness. Tybalt and Mercutio fight with swords, while Romeo brandishes a machete; meanwhile, the Prince's guard are armed commandos who fire off machine guns at odd moments. They look so silly that it seems the Prince's heavy-handed attempts to control the citizens of Verona are being ridiculed; again, this is unsupported by the text. Though Jonathan Bate, in a programme essay, writes justly of Romeo as “a tragedy that keeps surprising us with flashes of comedy”, such features as the Friar's battered tin hut suggest full-scale farce; yet Lloyd Hutchinson attempts, and to an extent achieves, a rather serious, “pastoral”, interpretation of the (Irish) Friar's part.

Amid all the noise and muddle, the two central performances emerge with surprising credit. Chiwetel Ejiofor is an energetic, likeable Romeo who entirely escapes the drippiness to which the role is often subject, and Charlotte Randle is a touchingly sweet and ingenuous Juliet, though the new registers of rhetoric and “acting” that Juliet develops in Act Four seem beyond her reach. There is also one passage in which the company achieves a strikingly successful ensemble effect: Act Four, Scene Four, in which first the Nurse, then Lady Capulet, then Capulet, then the Musicians, discover Juliet “dead”. Often heavily cut, their repetitive lamentations—

O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!
Most lamentable day, most woeful day
That ever, ever, I did yet behold!

—and so on, are played out in full, and the scene is genuinely affecting.