[In the excerpt below, Jackson reviews the 1995-96 production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Adrian Noble and performed at Stratford-upon-Avon. Jackson highlights a number of “awkwardnesses of staging,” finds that the performances by the actors in the roles of Romeo and Juliet were not very passionate or compelling, and praises the performances by the Nurse and Friar.]

In its brochure advertising the 1995-96 Stratford season the Royal Shakespeare Company defined itself as “the finest actors and directors working on great plays in some of the best theatre spaces in the world” and promised “World Class Classical Theatre.” One can hardly blame any company for setting out its stall as attractively as possible, so there is no need to require that “possibly” or “perhaps” be inserted in this kind of statement. However, the actual achievements of the 1995-96 season suggest that some questioning is in order. If in this marketing context “Classical” means “mainly well-known plays from an established repertoire,” the choice of plays for the season did justify this claim. But if “Classical” implies a distinct performance style or tradition, as it does in dance, or if “World Class” is to be understood as “on a par with the best available anywhere,” there was room for doubt. Distinctive ingredients of world-class classical theater should include innovation, a dynamic relationship with what is familiar and traditional, and an ability to make old texts new without ceasing to be attentive to their expressive idiom. Having proclaimed itself world class and classical, what did the RSC deliver?

The season offered only five Shakespeare productions in Stratford's three theaters. The main house presented a challenging Richard III (which Robert Smallwood discusses on pages 326-29) and a vigorous and quirky Shrew, but the other main-stage productions, Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, were lackluster affairs. In the Swan Theatre, one of the best spaces for his plays, Shakespeare was represented briefly by The Tempest, which was paired with Edward Bond's Bingo. The quasi-Elizabethan space was also used for a lively staging of The Devil is an Ass but otherwise hosted plays written later than those for which it was designed: Chekhov's Cherry Orchard (directed by Adrian Noble and the best production in the company's season), Ian Judge's flamboyant Relapse, and Michael Bogdanov's assault on both parts of Goethe's Faust. At the Other Place were Calderón's The Painter of Dishonour, an adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and Euripides's Phoenician Women. …

Romeo and Juliet, directed by Adrian Noble and designed by Kendra Ullyart, was set in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a rather gloomy Verona. Sunlight was all but excluded from a narrow street, where café tables and lines of gray laundry constituted the local color. Arcaded walls of gray marble slid on and off to make the stage space more or less confined as successive scenes demanded. The costumes (and a snatch of La Traviata in the party scene) suggested the Italy of the Risorgimento, and Shaun Davey's score recalled The Godfather, strengthening the oppressive atmosphere of interfamilial strife. Tybalt (Dermot Kerrigan) was evidently a nascent capo, accompanied by a slouching henchman who could produce the proscribed swords from under a folded raincoat at a moment's notice. The café setting served the street scenes well, although it seemed odd for Romeo to arrive onstage in 1.1 to find no more sign of disorder than a couple of table napkins lying on the floor. “Ay me! What fray was here?” has rarely been so meagerly motivated or given so little emphasis. At the Capulets' party, otherwise staged effectively as a family gathering with young children included in the fun, Romeo accosted Juliet from behind, taking her hands awkwardly (and not making much of “palm to palm” as a consequence). At least one of Romeo's asides was electronically amplified: though the actor does not have a strong voice, it was surely a failure of direction to allow the bustle of upstage business to drown out a protagonist. There were other awkwardnesses of staging. In the balcony scene (2.2) the generous amount of light made Juliet's puzzlement about her visitor's identity unbelievable, and in 5.3 the Capulet mausoleum was so well lit that it seemed absurd for Romeo to fight with Paris without recognizing him. As if to make the incongruity more obvious, the friar was able to identify Paris (by now face-down on the floor) as soon as he looked across the stage. In 3.5 Juliet's bed rose from a trap, a curtain rising with it to separate it from the exterior wall with the balcony seen previously. The lovers effectively exited from what had been established as the bedroom to appear above, facing the audience, for Romeo's descent from the window. Juliet then descended to her bedroom again, making the scene an odd combination of naturalistic and formal staging.

At first glimpse Romeo (Zubin Varla) was winningly awkward, his voice rising to a peevish thin tenor and his body contorting in the agony of his calf-love for Rosaline. Unfortunately the experience of Juliet's love did little to alter him. At times he positively squirmed with delight, rubbing the back of one leg with the top of his other foot, and he reacted to his banishment with a prolonged tantrum. Juliet (Lucy Whybrow) was pretty but not passionate, a small-voiced, doll-like young person. Sexual passion was not very evident, even in “Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds …,” despite the impetus given to this speech by its delivery from a garden swing. … “When he shall die / Take him and cut him out in little stars …” was a charmingly fanciful notion rather than an expansive and daring moment of sensual fantasy, and “I have bought the mansion of a love / But not possessed it” was merely petulant. Her response to the news of Tybalt's death and Romeo's banishment was more hysterics than desperation, reminiscent of her reaction to the Nurse's teasing in 2.5. Juliet raved and flopped on the floor, only managing to salvage some self-possession and gravity when she picked up the rope-ladder cords. More arresting was a sudden glimpse of the Nurse's bewilderment and emptiness—“These sorrows make me old.” Friar Laurence (Julian Glover) was a tough and worldly amateur herbalist with a Scottish accent and an astringent manner. In 2.3 he came to the café for what was clearly his daily morning espresso, taking a flower from the table setting to illustrate his discourse on the properties of herbs. The same flower served as an ingredient when he mixed Juliet's potion in 4.1—is this the first time that Friar Laurence has prepared the brew onstage rather than simply providing it from his stock of ready-mixed drugs? Romeo's hysterics in 3.3 provoked the priest to a sharpness of tongue which seemed to have the audience's sympathy, and he would have forfeited little of it (and probably earned a round of applause) if he had cuffed the whining hero soundly. Like Susan Brown's warm, strongly maternal Nurse, the friar seemed an exemplar of mature good sense in a world of absurd rivalries between the young men and callow emoting from the allegedly tragic couple. One of the production's few strong points was its insistence that both friar and nurse fail their charges at crucial moments.

Mark Lockyer's Mercutio was clearly disturbed. The Queen Mab speech started as exhibitionism and became a dark, unnerving descent into sexual disgust, a dangerous mood from which his friends had to help him recover. He went to Capulet's feast in grotesque drag, with balloons as breasts, and got so drunk that his companions had to make their excuses and leave. The extravagance of his affection for Romeo created a sense that for him bawdy talk was a covert expression of homosexual desire. The principal interest of the production lay in this and a few other individual performances (notably Julian Glover's and Susan Brown's but also Michael Gould's sensible, worldly Benvolio and Christopher Benjamin's feeling, passionately patriarchal Capulet). The absence of any evidence of passion or even accomplishment in the title roles helped to reduce this to yet another routine rendition of a popular, much-studied, and therefore bankable play ….