By the time you finish reading this article, Asia Osborne’s Romeo and Juliet will be sold out. So go and book now, and I’ll spend the rest of this review telling you why.
At present, I’m sounding out ways to say “this is amazing, this is utterly amazing, mug old ladies and small children for tickets if you have to” without forsaking all claims to cool judgment. Unfortunately, most of my reaction to this show is just jealousy (of Osborne – I so wish I’d directed this) and inarticulate, flapping-hand gestures of love.
Osborne’s adaptation of the text savages the play, tumbling it into a dark world of Carrollian dream-fantasy, American Gothic and the sublime. Heavily inspired by Punchdrunk, makers of site-specific theatre, to my mind this promenade production actually improves on their ethos: whereas Punchdrunk theatre often only allows small audiences into small spaces, Osborne’s production redresses this elitism by re-radicalising an existing large space, democratising theatre in a way that’s incredibly relevant to contemporary explorations of the ensemble.
Into the transformed O’Reilly come a masked audience, guided by a weaving, black-suited cast. Together, they explore a space filled with white silk, red flowers, black umbrellas, built on an aesthetic equally indebted to Sondheim’s West Side Story and the Mexican Day of the Dead.
With contrasting scenes running simultaneously, and audiences free to move around the space, the performers have nowhere to hide; a bored audience can easily turn their backs and head across the hall. And yet my interest never waned.
Osborne is as clever as she is creative: student acting often suffers from being too big for its space, with gestures too grandiose, voices too loud. In the big, bleak box that is the re-made O’Reilly, an Oxford ensemble finally has the space to run, to jump, to leap and climb and even to scream; above all to create theatre that’s intense without being pointlessly in-your-face.
She has accomplished a miracle of dramatic development: frankly, there are several in this cast whom, in previous productions, I have seen be as bad as an Oxford stage will allow anyone to be. All were vastly improved, and fully deserved their place especially strong ensemble.
This is the theatre of audacity. Osborne kept doing things that shouldn’t work, should absolutely stink – people stab each other with umbrellas, wrap each other in white silk, and (repeatedly) chase each other through the back doors of the O’Reilly, necessitating a delay before their appearance on the balcony.
This happens last, and most notably, at the moment before Will Spray’s Tybalt is murdered by Etiene Ekpo-Utip as Romeo. The delay – unmasked, for once, by action elsewhere in the room – has the potential to be slow, to be awful, to be embarrassing. Nevertheless, Will Spray’s waiting game, as the ‘prince of cats’ realises he’s cornered, becomes the second most exciting moment of the piece.
It’s surpassed only by the brutal, satisfyingly scrappy tussle that follows. Seriously, go and watch Spray and Ekpo-Utip beat each other up. There were audible whimpers and yelps from my section of the crowd. I even liked the shouting.
Of the women, Juliet Dukes as Juliet, and Eleanor Rushton as the Nurse, excel. Dukes perhaps overplays Juliet’s sweetness, delivering an occasionally prettified performance, but the scene where she learns of Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment is monumental.
When the delayed agony of the Nurse’s revelations finally breaks over Juliet’s head, we see in Jukes a baroque grief made intimate not grandiose, horrific and not hysterical. She also does a fabulous line, incidentally, in believable sobbing. Brian McMahon, as a spider-like Mercutio, exemplifies the spirit of the piece with his creepy, cocksure characterisation and sustained energy.
When you see Romeo and Juliet, share the company’s boldness, passion and playfulness. Don your mask and doff your inhibitions. There are rough edges, but there are moments, minutes, scenes and sequences of sublimity; places where criticism has to stop and I have to clutch your sleeve and say, book. Book now.
Not because it’s been co-opted by a clique, or because the lead is famous or because anyone takes their top off. But because it’s intoxicating and ambitious and different, and – unfortunately – it’ll be over by Sunday.
Romeo and Juliet is on at the O’Reilly Theatre at Keble until Saturday.