Menace and magnificence

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. Sambé is a double-espresso dancer, all leapfrogging grace and caffeine-high hits.

Against this terrific trio, Matthew Ball’s Romeo is subdued. His lines are elegant, his leaps assured, but he is too introspective. His fleetness, his handsome, expressive gestures are perfectly princely, but there is a failure to connect: both with his Juliet (Lauren Cuthbertson — exceptional) and with his audience. At times he flares bright. His excitement and boyish delight in the balcony scene, as he realises Juliet isn’t another piazza pick-up but the real deal, are palpable. Their first lifting, lilting kiss is the stuff of teenage dreams. But all too often Ball’s mind seems elsewhere.

Juliet is an ingénue with an edge. Whether Cuthbertson is dancing Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or the Young Girl in The Two Pigeons, she is playful and curious without ever tipping over to twee.