REVIEWED: ROMEO AND JULIET

The first walk into the Cathedral is a sobering and solemn experience. Every rough hewn stone, every towering pillar, and every luminous stain glass window was built to unite and bring ever closer the frailty of human life with the soaring and unconquerable truths of the spirit. It is hard to imagine a better place to play out the larger than life love and vice of Romeo and Juliet.

The expectations are high. For once it is the actors that must live up to the setting and not the other way around. 
Perhaps it is this hubris that was the very downfall. Compared to the unyielding and imposing statues, most of the acting felt soft. Everything was there that could have complimented the scene. Convincing Elizabethan dress, choreographed fencing scenes, Shakespeare’s own script. And yet, it fell quite flat upon the audience’s eager ears. To be fair this was due in part to the often rote delivery of the actors, and in part to an unwieldy sound system. 
For almost the entirety of the first half, the sound system was either on, and emitting strange static noises, or it was off and the actors were left to fend for themselves in a cavernous and echoing cathedral. When the sound system was off, it was almost impossible to understand what the actors were trying to say.

It didn’t help that the actors often delivered their lines in a rush, as if to prove how comfortable they were with the language. The language of Shakespeare is meant to be given particular emphasis, and played with on the tongue. It is the main sustenance of the play and without it the understanding of the characters wilts and dies. Shakespeare is meant to be reaching out to us from centuries past, brushing us with his beautiful, lilting language, to show us just how universal and timeless man’s passion can be. But it was only when the actors occasionally took their time to emphasize the lines deliberately, with passion and a slow emotion, that it was possible to understand and connect with them on a similar level.

It was also a grievous oversight that without a raised platform to create a stage in the center, only the first two rows had a clear view. Sitting decently far back, it was a strain to see even the heads of the performing characters. It was a shame to not be able to see what seemed to be excellent costume arrangements and choreography, but it was near unforgiveable to have Romeo and Juliet’s dying scene obscured almost completely due to the stage arrangement.

Georgie Franklin, playing the role of the nurse, and Michael Forde, as Mercutio, were quite convincing in their amusing antics, though perhaps these were easier roles to play than the sustained passion needed to play Romeo and Juliet. Serena Gosling, easily played off the gentle naivety of the young Juliet, swept off her feet by the dashing Romeo. It seemed a little harder for her to play the role of the lone, suffering wife confronted with death, banishment, and parental abuse on all sides. David Myers, as Romeo, seemed a little more comfortable playing the tortured victim, though his eternal and everlasting love for Juliet was hardly convincing. 
And perhaps this has hit upon the biggest disappointment of the play, and what exacerbated the other minor faults of an otherwise smooth play. The chemistry between Romeo and that of his Juliet, was nonexistent. Which made the fact that they kissed after almost every line all the more awkward. Romeo and Juliet, above all else- above the crude jokes, the dangerous street brawls, the aggressive relationships- is a tale of a transcendent love. A love so pure, it’s vessels were doomed to perish in a world of such base relations. It is about a love so passionate that not parental disapproval, not murdered kinsmen and friends, not hopeless banishment, and not even death could keep them apart. And yet, there was more awkward space between their embracing bodies than that between Verona and Mantua.

This is not to say that there is not hope for this play. Perhaps it was only nerves that kept the audience at arm’s length. The lighting was impressive and highlighted the naturally imposing features of the cathedral archways. Each actor was quite dramatic, loud, and exuberant in their deliveries. Xander Drury, Charlie Warner, and Tom McNulty, as the Prince, Tyblalt, and father Capulet respectively, were notably good at giving those deliberate and roaring speeches fuelled with frustration and rage that their characters are known for. The main thing this play is wanting for, apart from a more cooperative sound system, is a spark, and preferably a burning flame, to give life to an otherwise ordinary play.