Romeo & Juliet - Duke of York's Theatre

In that very row D seat at the interval now and I'd give that a strong no!

Thanks for the review, Dave. I felt almost the same as you.

Poll added.

A fast scroll through the more in depth reviews posted, as I’m not there until end of June and don’t want to know too much, but it already sounds like it’s as divisive as other JL productions!

Looking out for any comments though from anyone else who managed to get a front row £25 seat as interested to know how good / bad the view is from there.

Should be totally fine. I was second row. Depending on the seat might have the cast sat in the stage right in front of you and there’s very stern security to prevent any inappropriate behaviour.

3.5 stars from me - I was sat in row B four rows from the stage. This is a good production but not for purists. Great camera work, direction, some excellent performances. The whispering, popping of mics etc started to grate in the second half. The rooftop scene felt a little pointless and the bright daylight jarred with the general darkness of the staging. A few surprises that added to a sense of suspense, but as somebody brought up on RSC Shakespeare, the biggest sacrifice in this production is the text and how it is delivered. Rhythm/metre/cadence all lost to the deliberate 'street' vibe adopted by the director. Some lines simply lost to mumbles or whispers. The actors who know their stagecraft truly shine in this production - the rest is just superfluous distraction. Substance has been sacrificed for style, and feels a somewhat tired and jagged outcome. Jamie Lloyd needs to refresh his house style to avoid becoming a clichéd hackneyed 'one-trick pony'. (Coming from somebody who LOVED Sunset Boulevard.)

I've previously suggested that Jamie Lloyd should direct The Iceman Cometh but I wonder if might revisit The Duchess of Malfi or even do another John Webster like The White Devil. 

These ratings are quite interesting! I'm looking forward to seeing it.

I'd like to sit down with Jamie Lloyd with a pint and ask him if it was Holland's idea to do this.

I don't think polarisation is a prerequisite for art to be good, but I did appreciate your detailed review, as I can tell from that I would have been on the opposite side of the divide with much rolling of eyes. I'm so glad I resisted the FOMO urge to book.

Saw this last night and LOVED it!

For me, Jamie Lloyd has created a "Romeo and Juliet" that feels completely fresh.

The focus is not love, but crime. The stylistics are such that this feels like the most monumental "true crime" show of all time.

Spoilers follow. . .

My brother watches wall to wall true crime, which I avoid, preferring art. He loves how things happen, the passions, the motives, the actions, the unintended consequences, the counting down of days from the conception of a crime, to its commission, to its wrapping up by the authorites, etc.

Since "Romeo and Juliet" is known as the greatest love story of all time, I've unthinkingly just thought of it that way, viewed the strengths of any production based on how much innocent youthful fire is sparked in the actors by Shakespeare's poetry, how much tearful nostalgia for youth I feel. All the violence and tragedy I have treated as necessary story elements to concentate the impact of that youthful fire, to make it feel more rare, more precious, more fleetingly beautiful. Zefirelli's 1968 movie, with Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting always moves me for these reasons: they are just so sweet.

Even Baz Luhrman's ultra-violent gang movie just used the gang violence as spicy dressing while DiCaprio and Danes were cuter together than kittens.

There is NOTHING sweet about this production! Nothing cute! Nothing!

A nasty, incessant, clanking, pulsing, panic-inducing musical scoring makes cutesiness utterly impossible.

Instead, Lloyd gives us the ominous blood red counting down of days so common in true crime, as a mere matter of days will be all it takes for our characters to destroy themselves, with Lloyd starting with a blood red "Sunday" up on the big screen.

Michael Balogun, as the Friar, is also our "true crime" reporter, getting extra narration duties, from start to finish, giving an immensely urgent and passionate portrayal of a man who just wants common sense to prevail. In that, he's like my brother, a disbelieving witness to the car crash inevitability of true crime, shocked at the world, trying to understand it.

Lloyd narrows the cast of characters, with Romeo and Juliet getting only one parent each, because the squabbles between the Capulets among themselves and the squabbles between the Montagues among themselves are not relevant to the procedural progress of the criming. That's a Montague vs Capulet thing.

This production is not at all interested in love for love's sake, but "love" as a motive for crime, with the intra-family enmity as the cue that makes it inevitable.

Juliet the motive, Tybalt the cue.

In one of Lloyd's most expressive mise en scenes, Tom Holland's Romeo is seen behind and inside a giant screen projection of Francesca Amewudah-Rivers' Juliet, the catalyst of his tragedy literally swallowing him up.

The scene on the roof is masterful, with the neon of the London Eye tourist attraction demonstrating that Romeo's Mantua is no different from our London, and like in the classic 1948 crime movie, "The Naked City," as Romeo pauses to drag on his cigarette, with the vista of our city behind him, his fate momentarily paused, we realise here in London too "there are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."

My favourite performance is Michael Balogun's reasonable man getting dragged into a multiple pile car crash that just can't be stopped by reason. Its why my brother watches those true crime shows, to find out why reason fails again and again and again. Balogun is emotive where everyone else are half automaton, controlled by the inevitability of fate. But Lloyd shows us that his reason will not be enough.

And by harnessing Shakespeare's poetry, dreamlike, half-muttered, whispered, thundered, shouted, Lloyd reveals Shakespeare as a proto-true-crime producer of the most monumental poetic proportions.

Lloyd cuts out the crap. There are no comic moments here. When Joshua-Alexander Williams' Mercutio, who hauntingly predicts his own fate in his ghostlike Queen Mab speech, meets that fate, there's nothing about scratches, funny moments, misdirection, just an elemental scream of "A plague on both your houses!"

Anyway, yes, this is a very stylised production. The exaggerated whispering of the early scenes is there to heighten the feeling of portentous inevitable death, and deny us any personalised humour or fun, even when the characters objectively are having fun. That's because Balogun's reporter already gave us the headline "A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife," and for Lloyd, true-crime reports aren't a joke. They are a warning to us all.

Other than Balogun, who I just loved, I thought Amewudah-Rivers was a thoughtful, self-possessed Juliet, Tom Holland was brilliantly agonised as the train of tragedy he was riding sped up uncontrollably, Freema Agyeman was brilliantly blunt, and Nima Taleghani's Benvolio was terrifically impotent as a desperate bystander to the criming.

For me, 4 and a half stars of seeing a story I thought I knew, but didn't. I withheld half a star in resentment for not getting any cutesy nostalgic teary-eyed youthful fun, which I love lol. This is a "Romeo and Juliet" my true-crime-afficionado brother might like even more than I do.

PS: I sat in Stalls F2 (for once being a member of ATG+ paid off), which turned out to be a good seat, and appeared to be slightly less restricted, in it's side view, compared to all the other £80 side seats (marked yellow on Theatremonkey's map). Unlike "Opening Night," I see no opportunity for a repeat visit, on account of dynamic pricing upwards. In my view, I like productions that allow early bookers to get a deal, instead of shafted, which is how booking early often feels lol.