Two households, both alike in dignity. Capulets in red tights, Montagues in green. Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet opens in a piazza where the clash of swords makes a fifth section of the orchestra. Strings, woodwind, brass, percussion… and steel. If Shakespeare’s young bloods and blades once seemed remotely Renaissance, made romantic by distance, Verona’s knife-crime crisis is now horribly real and present.
Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio (Matthew Ball, Valentino Zucchetti and James Hay) make a convincing gang: pumped-up, freewheeling, anarchic. They goose the harlots, twit the nurse and goad each other in reckless acts of lads, lads, lads bravado. Their bragging, ragging gatecrashers’ dance is a tour de force. Zuchetti is Mercutio the wind-up merchant: swift, hot-headed, drunk on his own machismo. Hay, a quick, witty, sportive dancer, sets a let-me-at-’em pace as Benvolio. He is in danger here, as he was in Frankenstein, of upstaging the hero. It is Marcelino Sambé, though, as the lead Mandolin, who dances them into a cocked biretta.
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