Romeo and Juliet
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in rep until 27 August
Rupert Goold’s new staging of Romeo and Juliet will rocket you into a state of renewed excitement with the play. He returns to the RSC for the first time since conjuring Patrick Stewart as a magus of the frozen north in The Tempest (2006). Ever inventive as a directorial travel agent, Goold now transports the star-crossed lovers from the land where the lemon trees blossom into a Stygian underworld, illuminated by flickering flames, spurts of steam and sudden pyrotechnic eruptions. Why, this is hell, nor are the lovers out of it.
Goold summons up that sense of dangerous antagonisms both feudal and religious that would have been in everyone’s minds when the play was first given in the London of the mid-1590s. The resurgence of Catholicism and its Inquisition was a very real fear.
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