Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in the Open Air at Regent’s Park

Romeo and Juliet

Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park. To July 24. https://openairtheatre.com

by Alastair Macaulay

We’re beginning to learn all over again how live performance can transform our perception of even the most familiar theatrical fare. The Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, has begun its 2021 season with Romeo and Juliet. The production, its first offering since the long pandemic pause, is played without an interval. Especially during the first three acts, the play acquires a marvellous impetus, with Romeo and Juliet shown as witty, merry, high-spirited, witty characters, who look for joy until finally and irreversibly it is dashed from them.

In those first three acts, the production greatly added to my understanding of the play. Currently, the fourth and fifth acts are more severely cut than this cast deserves. Shakespeare’s opening Chorus speaks of the play’s “two hours’ traffic of our stage”, but this production, played without interval, runs at one hour and three quarters. Several of the play’s more astounding passages are excised: I especially missed Juliet’s furious soliloquy (“Ancient damnation!”) in which she reverses her opinion of the Nurse, and the majority of the final scene, above all most of Romeo’s astounding 46-line death speech.

What’s your idea of Shakespeare in performance today? Returning to British theatre in summer 2019, I noted that it was using Shakespeare in particular to transform perceptions of four central aspects of society: race, gender, sexuality, class. I’d been expecting, however, a new cultural timidity to set in after the pandemic. To judge by this Romeo, not so. The Open Air was long known as the most safely conventional of Shakespeare theatres - yet here, in June 2021, it showed itself plunging right back into types of casting that will surely seem radical and unconventional to many infrequent theatre-goers. Several of the most striking roles (Juliet, Lord Capulet, Benvolio, Escalus) were given to black actors. Two of the most crucial male roles (Tybalt, Benvolio) became female characters, played by women and with changes of gender made within the play’s text. Several kinds of accent were given equal emphasis without any being presented as superior. Although this play certain features class issues, those weren’t translated into standard English class values: no posh accents; no distinction between roles as U or non-U.

It’s amazing how naturally this new Verona falls into place, and how easily Shakespeare’s words pour forth as expressions of the world we know. Kimberley Sykes directs. Dress is modern, with the young men in jeans; when Juliet and Romeo meet, both are wearing calf-length boots. Race is not an issue: although Capulets and Montagues are at war, both households contain white and black people. All the characters speak with passion and humour, with no inhibitions about Received Pronunciation.

A bigger issue is that taped music (composed and directed by Giles Thomas) is played throughout. Yet even this blot becomes a virtue: it lends pulse, speed, and filmic impetus to each scene. Since the Open Air is a notoriously hard space in which to project voices (I’m told that windy nights are worst), I won’t kick up a fuss about all the actors wearing and using head-mikes for amplification. But I do not forget that as late as the early 1990s, actors could project without assistance here; and those of us who love the thrill of voices reaching afar know what we miss.

Romeo, a play I’ve often seen over fifty years, abounds in wordplay and wit. I hadn’t known before, however, how it can gain from being played with speed and high energy. Although Romeo (Joel MacCormack) is melancholy when first we see him, Sykes’s production shows that happiness is his home key. The same goes for Juliet (Isabel Adomakoh Young). When these two first catch eyes, they can’t stop smiles spreading across their faces. Juliet is still happy when impatiently awaiting Romeo to come to their bridal night (“Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds”). And she’s funny, as in the twinkle with which she asks the Nurse:

“How are thou out of breath when thou has breath

To say to me that thou art out of breath?”

When bliss is dashed from each of these two, we feel the more keenly what they have lost. And Romeo finds again his joy as he prepares to die with Juliet:

“How oft when men are at the point of death

Have they been merry!”

Theirs is not polished verse speaking; it’s direct utterance from the heart, whose sincerity and spontaneity we never question as the words burst from their lips.

Passion is natural to almost all these characters. Tybalt (Michelle Fox) is dashing, coldly furious, impatient for a fight. Mercutio (Cavan Clarke), similarly pale and with streaks of blue maquillage to lend him a strangely fantastic glamour, is dangerous, Celtic, powerful. The temper of Lord Capulet (Andrew French) is volcanic. Emma Cunniffe misses some elements of the Nurse’s habitual contrariness, both maddening and endearing, but the character’s loving and silly tenderness is vivid.

Naomi Dawson has designed the stage as if an earthquake has begun to split its central terrain, but with two upper floors behind. The Capulet ball happens on three levels, with more than a dozen characters claiming his or her space with impressive swagger; Capulets and Montagues fight on the open ground beneath, jumping across that crack in the ground. Juliet calls to Phoebus from the top of the edifice. Romeo, in exile, hears the news of Juliet’s death in a side window that hasn’t come into use before. Spatially, all this is exciting, fresh, energetic.

Romeo, however, is larger than this. Shakespeare shows us, as ballets and operas of this story do not, how the Nurse fails Juliet by encouraging her to marry Paris. He shows us how Juliet, hearing the Nurse’s advice, at first plays along but then, alone, furious, and in shock, rejects her former friend: “Ancient damnation! O thou most wicked fiend!” This soliloquy for Juliet lasts only eight lines but it’s crucial: it shows how isolated Juliet is, and how even the closest confidante has failed her. “Go counsellor!

Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain.”

Yet Sykes has cut this. Other cuts proliferate, from the opening Chorus (omitted altogether) to most of the tomb scene. Romeo’s long final speech, with its complex but brilliant play about the ideas of love and death, is Shakespeare’s final transformation of this poetic character; but little of it is left here.

Too bad. This is the kind of modern Romeo to make us rethink the play valuably – but it cuts its own effectiveness by cutting whole areas of Shakespeare’s play and thought.

It adds one dimension, though. When each character dies, she or he at once rises from the ground, surveys the scene, and goes to watch the action from the front row. This is a device I’ve seen in Michael Boyd’s definitive Royal Shakespeare Company production of the Henry VI tetralogy (2000 and 2006-2008) and in his no less classic Theatre for a New Audience production of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. It’s also a central idea of Game of Thrones. The dead become observing ghosts; and we are haunted by them. When Juliet, drinking the potion, cries that she sees her cousin Tybalt, here she certainly can.

The Open Air Theatre is one of the institutions of a London theatre. Some now famous actors appeared here early in their careers: I remember Damian Lewis as Hamlet (1994) and Benedict Cumberbatch as the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost (2001). Judi Dench, after more than thirty years of theatrical experience, directed both The Boys from Syracuse (1991) and, yes, Romeo and Juliet (1992) here. The play with which this space is most associated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in one of the many stagings of that I’ve seen here (almost all hilarious and cherishable), I remember how Matthew Burton, playing Theseus and Oberon in 1999, made Theseus’s speech about the lover, the poet, and the madman a revelation of new sublimity. Especially in June, it’s worth taking extra clothing: some of us added three extra layers by the end of this Romeo. I testify that, in the early 1990s, June performances here often had a different kind of sublimity: the twilight chorus of Regent’s Park birdsong used briefly to drown the play after the interval, an overwhelmingly beautiful experience. Since then, the park’s birdsong has sometimes grown ominously silent. On June 23, however, I testify that, while Juliet and Romeo were speaking of the lark and the nightingale, several other species were auditioning to be mentioned too.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2021