This is a new production of one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, directed by The Belgrade Theatre’s creative director, Corey Campbell. It is intended to provide an introduction to classical drama for people new to Shakespeare, and it includes new music and lyrics written by local Midlands artists A Class (music) and That’s A Rap (Corey Weekes and Keiren Hamilton-Amos—lyrics). The new material supplements Shakespeare’s text, which is largely uncut, hence the nearly three-hour run time, including the interval.
The setting is a non-specific, urban landscape with a marble floor surrounded by concrete walls with slots in them, a bit like the wall of Coventry Cathedral, and the cast is in neutral, monochrome contemporary dress. There is a gallery around the top of the set for the musicians and choir, and the company includes members of the Belgrade Ensemble, the Belgrade’s early career theatre artists training programme. At times, there can be up to thirty people on stage, actors and musicians, so this is a big show.
The premise is that the Montagues and Capulets represent two conflicting political parties, which avoids the West Side Story, racial divide take on the play. The director takes a few liberties with Shakespeare’s original text: some of Lord Capulet’s lines are given to Lady Capulet, so both of Juliet’s parents pressure her to marry Paris, not just her father, and the opening "Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" scene has gone. The play opens instead with video clips of Nigel Farage and Priti Patel and Lady Montague (Ellena Vincent) in a red sash and Lord Capulet (Asheq Akhtar) in Coventry City sky blue.
There are some very good actors in the cast giving very good performances. Kyle Ndukuba (Romeo) and Mia Khan (Juliet) are likeable and energetic, but the central trio of older women, Yasmin Wilde as Friar Laurence, Natasha Lewis as the Nurse and Lauren Moakes as Lady Capulet, are outstanding, and they bring out the best in their younger scene partners. Barret Hodgson’s video design is effective, Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster’s choreography is exciting, and the music, under Jonathan Campbell and Graham Campbell, musical directors, and Reisz Amos, choir lead, is excellent.
The problem is Corey Campbell’s production. You know sometimes you see a new production of a well-known play and you get the sense the director doesn’t like the play so they decide to ‘improve’ it? It’s one of those. The rap and sung sections don’t complement Shakespeare’s text, they marginalise it. The default lighting state for the sections of Shakespeare’s text is a general wash, the movement is minimal, and mostly naturalistic, and the volume (everyone is miked) is moderate. But as soon as it goes into a newly-composed section, the lighting becomes vibrant and colourful, the movement is choreographed and they turn the volume up. Rather than bringing Shakespeare’s text to life, it turns it into redundant exposition between the good bits. It is almost as if he is training the audience to hate Shakespeare by associating vivid theatricality with the new material and blandness with the original text.
All sorts of dramatic action has been cut from Shakespeare’s original play to make way for the new content. The clown role, Peter, is reduced to a handful of lines, delivered completely straight, Juliet should see the ghost of Tybalt just before she drinks the sleeping draft, which she doesn’t here, and Romeo doesn’t murder Paris. I’m not sure why he doesn’t, it might have been in response to concern over knife crime in a production aimed at a young audience, but if you don’t want to show knife crime on stage then you probably shouldn’t be staging Romeo and Juliet in the first place.
The disconnect between Shakespeare’s play and Corey Campbell’s production runs throughout the show. It’s not clear what the politics of the two rival parties at the start of the show are, but it doesn’t matter because it gets dropped after the first ten minutes anyway. Mercutio (Dillon Scott-Lewis) races through the Queen Mab speech with little sense of whom he is speaking to, why he is saying it or what any of it means, and when Romeo mourns the death of his friend, he does it standing on the opposite side of the stage from him. The balcony scene is staged in such a way that Romeo and Juliet can’t see each other so we don’t see them falling in love. The final indignity is when the Friar’s deeply moving final speech is faded out halfway through and replaced by Benvolio rapping.
This is an impressive production with a talented cast and some great music, it just seems to belong to a different play. There’s nothing wrong with writing a new show in response to a classic text, Talawa did it at The Belgrade last year with Play On!, based on Twelfth Night, so if Campbell wanted to commission a rap version of Romeo and Juliet, then it might have been better if he’d done it.