If you haven’t seen Streetspeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, then I urge you to (perhaps after the pub) and have an excellent time whilst your expectations of a performance of this play are ripped apart. At the bottom of the program we are given the command ‘Enjoy the show. And if you don’t, lie’. No critic responds well to either of these commands. Luckily for the director, I very much enjoyed the show. The honesty he might ask for as a result of this however may not be of the variety he would desire.

Was one of the main sources of enjoyment meant to be the rather odd and seemingly miss-placed interjections of the piano-man? The rather trite accompanying music was provided by Jefferson Carpenter, who seemed to fill in the lines of the actors onstage at points. His peak was when he gasped (much to my rather uncontrolled amusement) at the realisation that Juliet had married Romeo. Was it the director’s intention that the audience were stifling laughter during more intense moments of the plot because Balthazar was continuously entering on a space-hopper? He must surely have realised that such high-class comedic value would be appreciated by the audience for longer than it took for the plot to turn to a sombre moment. Equally, I’m unsure that the moment Friar Laurence is describing of the drug he is to give Juliet is meant to be farcical, but with the addition of the green spotlight and the choral ensemble, it couldn’t help but be just that. Add to this the fact that every death onstage was like something out of a children’s game at Halloween (yes, ladies and gentlemen, there was indeed fake blood coming out of Tybalt’s mouth, and Juliet’s body had indeed evaporated before her parents arrived to grieve), and you already have a comprehensive list of directorial decisions that had a profound effect on increasing overall enjoyment throughout, but beg the question of whether they had done so in the intended way.

I do not know what the director was trying to achieve. Jeff Carpenter’s  ‘Romeo and Juliet’ fails to conjure any sense of tragedy or romance. Don’t expect anything high-calibre.

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