This excellent troupe of Shakespeareans seems to have an infallible touch. Their Romeo and Juliet – played under an almost warm English summer evening sky in the delicious surroundings of Regent's Park – is exactly right. It is performed as written, so true to the text and so revealing of the text's intentions that it should be regarded the template Romeo and Juliet that everyone should see, thus giving them their point of reference for the play's beauties, absurdities, poignancies, and deep human realities. Credit for the accuracy of the rendition must go to the production's director, Dominic Hill, who has allowed the words to speak for themselves, and done everything right to bring out the richness of character in the parts. For these are all very real people, from Mercutio to Juliet's father, from the absolutely wonderful character of the nurse (here played with pure genius by Carol Macready) to Juliet herself – a beautifully observed and profoundly attractive character, one of those warmly instinctive and intelligent women who abound in Shakespeare's works –and thence to the impulsive, passionate Romeo, whose inability to master his feelings is the motor of the drama, and its tragic centre. 
      Laura Main's Juliet is a young, happy, full-hearted girl ready to love and be loved, and eager to be swept away by a passion which answers her own capacity to be passionate. Critics of the play down the centuries have frowned on the haste and improbability of that passion, the inexperience of the parties to it, the suspicious fact that Romeo was still sighing for Rosaline when he first saw Juliet and tipped head over heels in love with her. The lovers were defended by Hazlitt, who justly observed that Shakespeare had anatomised the swiftness and all-consumingness of youthful romantic infatuation with a magnifying-glass-like precision that speaks his own intimate experience. Romeo might indeed be thought a rudderless barque before the gales of desire; but Juliet is of a different order, a fruit ripe on the bough, and therefore as loveable as she is ready to love, making sense of the drama and giving it its chief source of poignancy amongst all the rivalries and hatreds which intensify and frame her and Romeo's unhappily fated joy. 
      Every performance was strong and convincing, but Carol Macready cannot be too highly praised for her outstanding nurse, and John Hodgkinson's powerful and assured presence on stage gives any role he plays an unmistakable stamp of quality. Benedict Cumberbatch is a leading man in a supporting role here as Benvolio, and with his quizzical looks is cut out for great things. These younger players have the sterling examples of such as Jon Cartwright and Timothy Knightley around them, and indeed a cast which speaks Shakespeare, and acts him, as if it were in the blood – which one must suppose it is. 
AC Grayling