A Wild West Romeo and Juliet? It sounds like a terrible idea. I feared the worst for the Globe’s new rendition of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy.
I needn’t have worried about the setting. The Wild West stuff actually works quite well. As always, it’s the story that’s the biggest problem.
Samuel Pepys said Romeo and Juliet was the worst play he’d ever seen. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it’s surely Shakespeare’s worst denouement.
In case you’ve forgotten, a foolish Friar comes up with a cunning plan worthy of Blackadder’s Baldrick.
Give Juliet a sleeping potion that will make everyone think she’s dead, so she can wriggle out of her arranged marriage to a chinless chump called Paris. What could possibly go wrong?
Unfortunately, our silly Friar fails to inform Romeo of this fiendish scheme, so Romeo thinks Juliet really has died and consequently kills himself. Then Juliet wakes up and finds him dead, and kills herself. The end.
This convoluted finale is not only completely miserable, but also entirely implausible – and almost impossible to stage convincingly. No wonder 18th-century dramaturges rewrote it with a happy ending.
‘I had a lovely afternoon,’ said my wife as we left this matinée performance, ‘but I don’t think I’ll be watching Romeo and Juliet again.’
The main reason we had such a nice day out, in spite of the Bard’s inept plotting, is that the acting in this show is exceptionally good.
Jamie-Rose Monk was born to play Juliet’s nurse, a rumbustious role she inhabits absolutely. With her Cockney accent and clumsy bonhomie, you can picture her in EastEnders, pulling pints in the Queen Vic. Michael Elcock is a dynamic, charismatic Mercutio, the most appealing character in this drama. After he dies, just before the interval, the play never quite recovers.
Any Romeo and Juliet stands or falls on its two title roles, and in Rawaed Asde and Lola Shalam the Globe has found two rising stars. They’re both barely two years out of drama school, yet they tackle Shakespeare’s verse with a maturity that belies their relative inexperience.
It’s Shakespeare’s exquisite poetry that redeems his uneven love story, and Asde and Shalam really get inside it. It’s no mean feat to elucidate his complex imagery; to give his intricate rhetoric the clarity and naturalism of normal speech.
And yet they manage it – and so early in their careers!
Asde’s Romeo is a lovable scamp and Shalam’s Juliet is passionate and witty – a lot less passive and pliable than other Juliets I’ve seen. She doesn’t really look the part – despite her youth, she has the ample figure of a grown woman, not a girl of 13 – but that’s small beer beside the humanity and integrity she brings to the role. Asda’s cocky Romeo seems fickle by comparison.
So what about the Wild West theme?
Why does it play so well, when I was sure it would be awful? Yes, there are a few Blazing Saddles moments, when the whole thing almost tips over into farce. There’s something intrinsically ridiculous about an Englishman in a stetson. But in the main it works, because the concept makes good sense.
The Montagues and Capulets are a good fit for the feuding dynasties of the Old West, in a time and place in which deadly violence was endemic. As Shakespeare’s Friar observes, ‘Violent delights have violent ends.’
This gunslinging reboot also sheds fresh light on the personalities of Shakespeare’s ‘star-crossed lovers’. Juliet’s abandonment feels especially acute, in a locale we’ve seen in countless Westerns. Romeo shoots Tybalt in cold blood, giving Tybalt no chance to draw his gun. Is Romeo really one of the good guys? Juliet has known him for only three days. Can she really be in love with him?
Of course she can! For all its faults, Romeo and Juliet endures, not just because of the beauty of its verse, but above all because it recalls a time in all our lives when we were young enough and daft and brave enough to love another person utterly, completely.
Shakespeare’s Friar advises us to love moderately but, for the duration of this erudite, erratic play, we spurn his anaemic counsel. We dare to fall in love again – recklessly, hopelessly, with no prenups or preconditions.
Rawaed Asde and Lola Shalam do what all the best Romeos and Juliets do to us. They remind us how it feels to be in love, and how it feels to be young.
