The Romeo and Juliet now playing at the Globe is what the programme calls an 'original practices' production. This seems to mean that it's not set in Germany in the 1930s, or Harlem in the 60s, or in today's Britain, but in Elizabethan costume - and presumably with the intention of being played as if in the Elizabethan era. But it isn't. Modern mores and manners are mapped onto the archaic, and it exudes far less of the authentic Shakespeare than do many productions of transposed era. It is as if everyone had dressed up in funny clothes, and the Capulets' fancy-dress ball extended throughout the play, which only enhances the general lack of feeling. This was not helped by making the Nurse a man (Bette Bourne), which added a sense of pantomime dame. Of course the Nurse is coarse and bawdy in contrast to the refinement of Lady Capulet, Juliet's mother, but we are supposed to feel that Juliet is the result of their joint upbringing, and that the Nurse has earthy warmth and tenderness bound up with her bawdiness. Here it was lacking. 
      At least Juliet (Kananu Kirimi) was full of emotion, but she failed to arouse it. At first she seemed simply to be enacting a young girl's playful innocence, or a contemporary young woman's idea of what this might once have been, but here the costumes were of no avail - the innocence seemed simply anachronistic, unbelievable and irritating. As the action progressed, she became more impassioned, but unfortunately this involved incessantly waving her arms around, like someone badly impersonating a Frenchwoman. Just occasionally, as in the balcony speech, 'My bounty is as boundless as the sea', Shakespeare shone through. The speech is anyway unduly sophisticated for a young girl, and through Kirimi's rendition came Shakespeare's brilliant realization of the ecstatic abundance of female sexuality. It was in marked contrast to Romeo's shallowness. Shakespeare is being deliberately problematic in portraying the swift way Romeo transfers his passion from Rosaline to Juliet, but in this production it was difficult to imagine his remaining in love with Juliet, or even being deeply in love with her at all, and his suicide in love's name seemed merely implausible. Whether or not this interpretation was intended is hard to determine, since the production was anyway so much of a hodgepodge of styles.
      Another moment of feeling was just after Juliet's supposed death, when Peter, the Serving Man (a little part excellently played by John Paul Connolly} begs, 'Musicians, O, musicians, 'Hearts ease', 'Hearts ease'! O, an you will have me live, play 'Heart's ease'. We suddenly had a sense of what had been lacking - the wonderful Shakespearian sense of human exuberance riding out death and misery, and tragedy and comedy clasped huggermugger. There was a lot of would-be vigour, but the production was amateur without the zest and intelligence that so often lifts amateur or student productions. Not that Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's great plays, but it deserves better than this.
Roderick Swanston