Reviewed by Malcolm Calder
Romeo and Juliet
By William Shakespeare
Pop Up Globe Company
Director David Lawrence
SkyCity Theatre, Auckland
Until 25 February
Review by Malcolm Calder
After a brief, and apparently successful, season of Twelfth Night at Q Theatre last year, Pop Up Globe Shakespeare Company has popped back up again in 2024. This time with one of Shakespeare’s safest classics Romeo and Juliet running in a brief back-to-back season with a remounted Twelfth Night, at the larger SkyCity Theatre.
This venue is a far cry from the company’s heyday in the scaffolded pseudo-replica behind the Q Theatre, followed by 3 years in the leafy environs of Ellerslie. Romeo and Juliet makes the transition well and the house-full sign was out for Opening Night.
This is rumbustious theatre with the primary aim of entertaining people. And if it manages to change a few minds that’s a bonus. The Opening Night Romeo and Juliet audience was an interesting and highly-varied bunch with a huge age spread and attending for many different reasons. Not unlike the audiences at Ellerslie. Nor, come to think of it, many of Shakespeare’s own audiences.
This one ranged from boomers to their grandchildren and all points in between. There were probably some serious Shakespearean afficionados, but many seemed to be longstanding Globe-converts along with some who were just looking for a good entertaining night out, rather than a draining one with significant mental effort required to ‘understand’ often subjective new work.
David Lawrence’s Romeo and Juliet certainly had something for everyone. No longer in the scaffold-replica Globe, he has developed a close-knit ensemble that works and moved them around both the stage and the theatre itself so that they came to own the joint. This resulted in part of the audience being on stage, and the actors spending a fair bit of time in the auditorium.
More importantly and perhaps significantly, he achieved this with a cast that largely exuded strength. Today, holding a large-ish room for a long-ish time is an effort for many actors – even more so when the language and its Shakespearean rhythms are pretty important and this cast manages to do so almost uniformly. Juliet’s balcony speech(Natasha Daniel) is a great example, accentuated by her very location in the theatre. Her clarity and power was something shared throughout the ensemble. No spoiler alert about where she was though.
In fact, all the more serious characters hold their ground well, and set things up for others to generate a load of belly-laughs. Let’s face it, pretty much everyone knows that R&J is rife with deaths, so why not play the lead-up to them comedically. Keeps the masses entertained y’know. And while we’re about it, let’s make the deaths a bit gory and gruesome as well! So it’s perhaps no accident that the ticketing categorisation for this Romeo and Juliet avoids the conventional header ‘Theatre, tragedy’ and uses ‘Theatre, comedy’ instead. It is. And it works. As both a comedy, but one undershot with tragedy.
Many of Lawrence’s cast have appeared with Globe in one form or another over several years. For example, I found Salesi Le’ota (Nurse), who I first saw in Globe’s Hamlet 5 or 6 years back, has grown immensely, developing his strength, energy and immaculate timing considerably He is at the heart of the comedy, ably supported by Frith Horan, whose energetic, clownish Mercutio really becomes the ‘saucy merchant’ Nurse brands him to be and almost overshadows Tybalt (Adrian Hooke) and even Friar Laurence (Kevin Keys).
That said, this production remains a tragedy at its core. And Natasha Daniel and Alistair Sewell (Romeo) give us two very young lovers drawn together by adolescent passion but tragically fated to wind up nowhere. They carry it well.
However, this remains essentially a theatrical entertainment. The cast is aware of this and the audience is too. And that leaves plenty of space for the delivery of Shakespeare’s words, time to play with the emotions he has drawn and just plain have fun.
In summary ? Well, Romeo and Juliet seems almost like a theatrical production about a theatrical production. That is just great and it’s refreshingly good to see the Pop Up Globe Company at work again. – Enjoy
New Zealand Arts Review 