In “Romeo and Juliet,” fate is a matter of bad timing. Shakespeare’s young lovers are confounded as much by rotten luck as by the realpolitik of their warring clans: Urgent communications don’t get through; realizations come too late.
A new London production, directed by Robert Icke, foregrounds this aspect of the story with a large digital clock that intermittently appears above the performers. On several occasions, it rewinds briefly and scenes replay with slight but consequential variations, inviting us to ponder how things might have turned out differently. Driving the point home, three large panels at the rear of the stage occasionally rearrange themselves to form a threshold through which the actors pass — quite literally sliding doors.
The staging feels gimmicky, but this “Romeo and Juliet,” which runs through June 20 at the Harold Pinter Theater, is redeemed by winning performances in the title roles.
The “Stranger Things” star Sadie Sink, who recently wowed Broadway in “John Proctor is the Villain,” plays Juliet with a brittle grace that feels true to the roiling passions of adolescence. The character is 13 — a decade younger than Sink — and this Juliet is every bit a teenager when she’s nervously fingering her palm or wishing Romeo an awkward, goofy-voiced “good night” early on. Later, she’s frantic but controlled, making spidery shapes with her hands as she unpacks the injustice of her predicament.
Life is imitating art for Sink’s younger co-star, the British actor Noah Jupe, who recently trod the boards as Hamlet in the movie “Hamnet” and is now making his stage debut. Naturally boyish in his features, Jupe’s Romeo evinces an endearingly doe-eyed, callow goodness. When things come together — at first — he punches the air in triumph; Juliet, in turn, jumps up and down on her bed. These are kids.
Sink and Jupe’s emotional sincerity isn’t shared by the rest of the cast, though, some of whom seem to be performing in a student revue. Clare Perkins’s sassy Cockney take on Juliet’s confidante, Nurse, gets some laughs but sails dangerously close to caricature, and Kasper Hilton-Hille’s Mercutio is a gratingly hyperactive pervert who repeatedly flashes his buttocks and penis. (The latter is portrayed allusively, with a prosthetic sheathed in a codpiece — thank god.) He starts the fatal altercation with Tybalt (Aruna Jalloh) by smooshing him on the head with an ice cream cone, then makes sex noises while they tussle.
It’s a little hard to square with the thriller-ish timbre of the staging. The digital clock reprises a feature of Icke’s recent, excellent West End and Broadway “Oedipus,” where it ticked an ominous countdown to suggest the inexorability of destiny. Here, despite those few rewinds, it really is just a clock, generating a cheap, slightly hammy suspense. In some scenes the clock persists bleeping in the background, and its insistent chirruping reminded me of my carbon monoxide alarm when it’s running low on battery.
And yet, in some key respects, this “Romeo and Juliet” succeeds. Its scenes bleed into one another, so that, at times, one of the lovers sits silently onstage while the other speaks. This creates a real sense of intimacy, evoking their persistent presences in each other’s thoughts. Enhanced by Jon Clark’s ethereal lighting, it makes for some gorgeous set pieces.
In the play’s torch-lit denouement, when Romeo mistakenly thinks Juliet is dead and gives her a final embrace before taking poison, there’s a slight, sleepy movement of her wrist. The audience can see it — and it casts a long shadow on the wall behind her — but Romeo misses it.
Our investment in “Romeo and Juliet” is inevitably tinged with a vaguely embarrassed nostalgia for our own lost innocence. There are many ways to downplay youthful passions: as infatuation, love-bombing, puppy love. So directors tackling the play often feel compelled to find a hook other than the wonder of young love. Two years ago, the West End’s hottest ticket was Jamie Lloyd’s emotionally restrained, moody monochrome staging, and that was bloodless and underwhelming.
The impulse is understandable but misguided, and everything good about Icke’s “Romeo and Juliet” is bound up in sincerity and sentiment. Take the end, for instance: After the couple’s tragic demise, three more performers take the stage, representing an older Romeo and Juliet and a daughter, allowing us to glimpse the life they might have had. By this point, Sink and Jupe have earned access to our heartstrings. We are happy to let them tug away.
Romeo and Juliet
Through June 20 at the Harold Pinter Theater in London; romeojulietplay.com.
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