Romeo & Juliet: an ‘outlandishly joyful’ take on the Shakespearean classic

For a play that famously ends with the suicides of its two teenage protagonists, Robert Icke’s production of “Romeo & Juliet” feels “outlandishly joyful” and “profoundly alive”, said Alice Saville in The Independent.

Fuelled by fizzing performances from its “duo of stars”, Sadie Sink (from “Stranger Things”) and Noah Jupe (“Hamnet”), this is a “richly emotional, brilliantly intelligent take on a classic – one that’ll plunge a knife into your heart so skilfully that you hardly notice the pain”. Sink, already a Broadway veteran at 23, is “magnificent” – with a “steely passion”, quick wit and unguarded physical abandon, said Nick Curtis in London’s The Standard. And she’s well matched by Jupe, who makes a consummately assured stage debut as a boyish and impetuous Romeo.

The two leads are terrific, agreed Houman Barekat in The New York Times. So sincere and touching are their performances that we almost forgive the quirks that threaten to overbalance the play.

In “Romeo & Juliet”, “fate is a matter of bad timing”: the young lovers are confounded by bad luck as much as warring clans. “Urgent communications don’t get through; realisations come too late.” Icke draws attention to this with a giant digital clock, counting down the hours, that appears above the actors; at times it rewinds, and scenes replay with slight variations. It’s all rather “gimmicky”, generating only a “cheap, slightly hammy suspense”.

There are a lot of distractions in this modern-dress staging, agreed Clive Davis in The Times. It too often lapses into broad comedy; at times it seems as if we’ve stumbled into “an entirely new play called ‘Two Geezers of Verona’”. Kasper Hilton-Hille’s Mercutio “can’t stop baring his bottom”, and there’s “precious little sense of a city at war with itself”.

It would have made for a more elegant production had Icke not made so many directorial “interventions”, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out – but “auteurs are gonna auteur”. And the cast is truly excellent: from the leads to Clare Perkins’ Nurse, and Clark Gregg as Juliet’s father Capulet, through to the minor characters. Reined in a little bit, this could have been an all-time great “Romeo & Juliet”. Instead, “we’ll have to settle for one that’s merely very good”.

Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1. Until 20 June.