Romeo and Juliet
1994: Alan Horrox
This is one of the most visually remarkable productions I have seen. It’s far less glowingly beautiful than the Zeffirelli production, but at the same time it’s arresting and convincing to watch. The problem is that it reduces Shakespeare’s play by such severe cutting that only the bare love story remains, surrounded by circumstantial tatters that are hard to piece together into a coherent whole. The whole runs to only 81 minutes — not even half as long as some other productions. Whole scenes are discarded, and others are reduced to the bare minimum and beyond.
The result is something that is hard to gauge or to measure alongside other productions. None of the performances is really outstanding; none of them is really appallingly bad, either. Romeo is credible, Juliet slightly less so (I think); the supporting cast is supremely adequate. Mercutio is wildly manic and even threatening, but he lacks McEnery’s and Barrymore’s comic notes, and hence is far less sympathetic. My sense for the drama is that Mercutio’s death shouldn’t come as a relief — and here it does.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the production as a whole is its art direction, which recalls Vermeer more than anything else. Lighting is not uniformly bright, as it is in Zeffirelli, or uniformly dim, as it is in some of the BBC productions: by day, the sun may shine brightly outside, but light enters rooms through the windows, and creates visually striking shadows on walls and across the omnipresent checkered floor. By night, there is only candlelight. The sets look as though they are taken from a sequence of Renaissance still-life paintings, and the colors are balanced with a painterly regard for the screen as a canvas. Costumes are not extravagant or gorgeous, but simple and attractive. The experience is somewhat peculiar, in that the setting for the story seems to have been put together with more care and subtlety than what is left of the play, when all is said and done.
All in all, worth seeing, but a kind of Shakespeare Lite when it comes to presenting the actual words of the poet.
Balthasar: Nicholas Barnes
Benvolio: Michael Müller
Capulet: John Nettles
Friar Lawrence: John Woodvine
Juliet: Geraldine Somerville
Lady Capulet: Jenny Agutter
Lady Montague: Kate Riding
Mercutio: Ben Daniels
Montague: Martin Milman
Nurse: Dearbhla Molloy
Paris: Freddy Douglas
Prince Escalus: David Lyon
Romeo: Jonathan Firth
Tybalt: Alexis Denisof