Shakespeare - Romeo & Juliet (Old Fire Station)
until Saturday 2nd June.

Much of Shakespeare is awash with contrivance, more apparent even in the tragedy compelled to conceal its impetus than the comedy that thrives on its own shamelessness - and few plays, Shakespeare's included, are more innately contrived than Romeo and Juliet. All too few of its directors have ever dared use this dense intricacy to its advantage, opting instead, with little success, to smother it with distractions: an overabundance of music, neverending fight scenes, or, worst of all, unnecessary stage indulgence - as when the RSC recently had Juliet sitting on a swing for tediously long periods of what is already a long play, and all too readily a tedious one.

None of this litany of escapism is at work here. A sterling pair of directors make a virtue of necessity, enhance the obvious that truly makes the play work and shun its many weaknesses - replacing these with their own, true, but new and intriguing ones. A quasi-puritanical treatment of the text adds to the brave spareness of stage and set, remarkably gimmick-free - the tool of the actors rather than their master. And what acting it is too: uniformly competent, often brilliant - and, fluffed lines aside, wonderfully at ease with the verbal acrobatics of a play that, more than most, requires a clarity and didacticism towards the audience perfectly enacted here.

The leads, rarely together, shine best alone. Kuang Liu's Romeo is little short of perfect - requisitely handsome, as sharp in his wit as in the self-pity from whose wallowing he abstains beautifully. Juliet (Bethan Jones) grows more convincing with time: initially Shakespeare's fragile, but never puerile, thirteen-year-old, swiftly developing into Romeo's equal in every sphere, from wordplay to maturity of suffering. Teenage angst is banished from the stage, and rightly so; what invades it instead is strikingly counterpoised high tragedy and comedy scenes that had their audience in hysterics: Paul O'Mahony's Mercutio is a pure delight, Benvolio equally so. Lawrence, a welcome chorus and the Nurse - short, loud, garrulous - all add to a triumph of understated capability. Flashes of genius abound, short-lived but indicative of this production's potential, given a little more ambition.

There are, inevitably, quibbles - from scene changes so grotesquely cumbersome they might be funny were they not so tragic, to the obscenity that is the noise from the OFS club, disfiguring the ending and an insult to the actors. But what is self-inflicted is well-intentioned, and what is brought off cries out to be seen - the rescue of a great play from the doldrums of directorial idleness.

John Wyndham, 28-05-01