Romeo and Juliet, Globe, review: a fine start to a Shakespearean summer

Telegraph

03-05-2025

The season of alfresco theatre is upon us and before every green space in the country plays host to a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, here comes the opening salvo in the Globe's 2025 programme. What a fine start to a summer of Bankside theatricals this Romeo and Juliet proves, revealing itself to be accessible, appealing and on the good side of broad, unlike too many over-emphatic shows at this venue in recent years.
The setting of Sean Holmes's production is instantly attractive to those new to watching Shakespeare and also to slightly jaded veterans of this text, such as your critic. We're in a frontier town in the American West in the late 19th century and Paul Wills's eye-catching design offers a backdrop of a saloon bar with traditional swing doors. As the action progresses, blood stains gradually appear on these blond wooden walls, a chilling reminder of the prologue's prediction of 'civil blood'.
Holmes's vision is no dispiriting instance of a classic play being shoe-horned into an outlandish concept, but something quite the opposite: it makes perfect sense for the Capulets and Montagues to be warring tribes in a place of barely suppressed lawlessness, a Stetson-wearing town where everyone, Friar Lawrence included, carries a gun in a holster and is more than ready to draw. An appealing band supplies bluegrass-style music for the Capulets' ball, the tempo of which livens noticeably with the disrupting, energising arrival of Romeo (Rawaed Asde). Up until this pivotal moment, Juliet (Lola Shalam) wears a cherishable look of bored tolerance for the staidness of the event.
Asde makes a notable stage debut, giving Romeo a slinking and mercurial charisma that suggests all the headstrong impetuousness of teenage infatuation. We miss Asde's liveliness when Romeo is banished to Mantua, although Shalam makes good work of Juliet, abruptly abandoned by all those closest to her, having to negotiate a series of impossible dilemmas. It's an awkward but inescapable fact that we believe more in the title characters individually than we do as a romantic pairing – sparks stubbornly refuse to fly – although there is great fun to be had when a wooden wheel-on balcony is brought into the midst of the delighted groundlings for that seminal scene.
Jamie-Rose Monk makes for a deliciously earthy and bawdy nurse, in stark contrast to Léa des Garets as a composed and distant Lady Capulet. The Nurse's pragmatic distancing of herself from Juliet hits home hard and is one of the decisive steps that lead to a finale of notable stillness and gravitas, whose bewitching atmosphere hushes the entire auditorium. The closing scene casts a spell, as the ghosts of all the characters slain during the action silently haunt the Capulets' monument; as befits her drugged status, Juliet hovers liminally between life and death. This image will stay with me long after memories of countless other productions of this play have vanished into the ether.