[In the following excerpt from his review of the 2000 Shakespeare season at Stratford-upon-Avon, Jackson comments on the visual austerity of Michael Boyd's staging of Romeo and Juliet, surveys Boyd's directorial innovations, and summarizes the principal performances in the production.]

Michael Boyd's austere Romeo and Juliet was played on a bare platform with a runway down through the auditorium and two walls of plain wood curving into a blind exit at the back of the stage. Verona was not fair in any sense of the word. The play began with a chair hurled across the empty stage, and Sampson and Gregory entered in full flow. Nothing of the sexism and violence of the opening “comic” dialogue was spared; the fight that ensued was bloody and furious. As it reached a climax, the actors froze and a young man walked on to deliver the Prologue—David Tennant, presently discovered to be playing Romeo. After speaking, he exited through the audience, an action echoed at the play's conclusion when Romeo and Juliet emerged from the tomb, passed through the assembled citizens, and walked off down the same ramp into the left-hand aisle of the stalls. For the second chorus Sampson, Gregory, and other servants reappeared, accompanied by braying music, to bawl a bawdy reading of the sonnet, mocking the lovers more savagely and directly than Mercutio (who after all goes to his grave knowing nothing about Romeo's love for Juliet.) These servants provided a leering though mostly silent chorus throughout, appearing “above” during the final scenes in Mantua and at the tomb. Similarly, the “ghosts” of Mercutio and Tybalt returned to watch the action from the same vantage point: Mercutio handed the poison down from the apothecary to Romeo and at some performances, for want of an appropriate understudy, spoke the apothecary's lines. Adrian Schiller played Mercutio with a fine disdain, dying in anger rather than ironic amusement. He was not as pathologically involved in his own fantasy of Queen Mab's sexual dimension (teaching maids to be “of good carriage”) as some actors have made the character.

David Tennant was a personable Romeo, with a strong sense of the humor of his situation—a strategy that works for the first three acts and has real validity in the balcony scene but which does not help enough with the passions of the play's latter part: if anything can carry a modern actor safely through Romeo's hysterics in the friar's cell and onto the firmer ground of Mantua and the tomb, it isn't humor. Somehow or other, Romeo has to take leave of his senses for a while and then defy the stars without seeming foolish. Juliet (Alexandra Gilbreath) was correspondingly lively and likeable, playing the balcony scene as a teenager in love, lolling full-length atop the wall (serving as balcony) with her legs crossed in the air as though absorbed in an endless telephone conversation. “Gallop apace,” coming as usual just after the interval, and the Nurse's arrival with the news of Tybalt's death and Romeo's banishment were once again cruel tests of the actor's ability to move up a gear emotionally. At times Juliet seemed too intent on explaining rather than living the imaginative language. The gothic extravagance of the potion speech was similarly forced. However, the pathos and anxiety of the parting from Romeo were effective, and she did manage a quiet determination in the face of her parents' wrath, dexterity in handling Paris's approaches, and a resolution less hysterical but still as extravagant as Romeo's in the friar's cell in 4.1.

The production's austerity of setting and costume (by Tom Piper, Boyd's frequent collaborator) included, typically for this team, some moments of telling visual effect and a consistent pattern of symbolism. The friar entered onto a bare stage and lifted up a trap to reveal the earth and vegetation his speech refers to: this subsequently served as the grave in the final scene. The bare walls were illuminated from below at moments of passion and crisis with subtly changing crimson lights or with a frosty blue glare. These moments were also emphasized with haunting, reiterated single notes or simple figures in the musical score (plangent cello, percussion, muted brass) played on the side balconies. Verona was not a bustling place but airless and rather oppressive—there was no street life to speak of. Paris seemed to be in charge of the prince's militia, a militaristic-looking but obviously ineffectual squad. The Capulet and Montague families were richly dressed, with Capulet's wife, in her high bodice, wide skirt, and glimpse of stocking, more glamorous than any of the other women. At Capulet's feast the principal dance was a slow lavolta, miming male sexual aggression and its rather sullen acceptance by the women, which then developed into a chain dance. When the maskers arrived, they beat the ground with sticks in some kind of fertility rite. Capulet's wife enjoyed having Tybalt lift her up by the tip of her stomacher, and Juliet seemed flattered by Paris's attentions. One could see why Juliet's attending this party might be a rite of passage. Along with the accentuated sexual wordplay of the servants, the Nurse, and Mercutio, these features suggested a world of erotic aggression and violence. Political authority, represented in the person of an ancient prince (Alfred Burke) supported on two sticks, was barely effective, and the Nurse was colder and more self-absorbed than is usually the case. Confronted with the desperate situation of Tybalt's death and Romeo's banishment, she took to fortifying herself with the contents of a hip flask and cowering helplessly against the wall. The friar (Des McAleer) was stern but calmly helpful, at least up to the point of his flight from the tomb. Arrested by the guard and interrogated by the prince, he gave an eloquent (slightly abridged) account of himself and events, but there was no sense of warmth in the community or of their acceptance of him as “a holy man.” One aspect of Boyd's clinical handling of Verona was the absence of all but the barest signs of religious observance. At least this was an antidote to the crucifix-festooned world of Baz Luhrmann's film, but not one lending much support to the play's references either to Christian religion or to the “stars.”