Skip to main content

Romeo & Juliet

Botanic Garden, Glasgow

Four stars 

 

On the street, the barricades are full of bouquets tied on in tribute to the victims of the teenage gang warfare that runs riot throughout Bard in the Botanics’ latest look at Shakespeare’s tragedy of young lovers. Gordon Barr’s outdoor production sets out its store on designer Hannah Grace Currie’s neglected building site. This becomes an adventure playground for the tracksuit sporting rebels without a cause who need to build a kingdom of their own.

 

While Mercutio and Benvolio might be happy to represent the Montague young team in a square go with Tybalt and the Capulet kids, as soon as Romeo and the boys gatecrash Juliet’s family do, our hero’s one-track mind is set on her alone. Juliet may be up for it too, but if either of them gets found out they’ll be grounded for life, or worse. 

 

The perils of puppy love in the middle of a family feud are plain to see in Barr’s production, which has a mere five actors carry the play. Bailey Newsome doubles up as the Capulet patriarch and Romeo’s best mate Mercutio, who he plays as a tough talking radge clutching a bottle of cider. Benjamin Keachie is just as chippy as Tybalt, while also making a cherubic looking Friar Laurence. As Benvolio, Star Penders is a more reserved and less confrontational figure, with Penders also providing empathy as Juliet’s Nurse. 

 

At the play’s heart, Sam Stopford and Lola Aluko make the cutest of couples as the doomed pair. This is the case from the moment Juliet peers down from the scaffolding that becomes her bedroom, to the play’s final self-destructive moments when they overdose on love. As Romeo and Juliet become the latest statistics of tit for tat violence, Barr’s refreshingly youthful affair suggests the kids aren’t always alright. 


The Herald, July 24th 2025

 

Ends 

 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
1 comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more