Tag Archives: Ross McGregor

Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet

★★★

OVO at The Roman Theatre

ROMEO AND JULIET at OVO at The Roman Theatre

★★★

Romeo and Juliet

“This is a fine production for a summer’s evening”

 

It is the time for theatre to go into the outdoors and the annual smatterings of summer Shakespeares in parks and gardens around the country. There is no finer setting for this than amongst the Roman ruins in St Albans.

Co-directors Stephanie Allison and Amy Connery show Shakespeare’s relevance today with a bold reimagining of the script and by transferring the story to 1990s Belfast at the time of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Live music from an onstage band – guitar, bass, violin – provide Irish-inspired tunes to help the mood (Musical Director Tommaso Cagnoni).

The set (Designer Simon Nicholas) is dominated by an iron derrick, daubed with graffiti and the words Peace by Piece. Stacks of boxes, pallets and sacks surround it, some marked helpfully with the word Belfast. This is a working dock and the lads set the scene by throwing sacks around before we see the first evidence of a city divided. A spunky Tybalt (Katie Hamilton) taunts the rather soft Benvolio (Lyle Fulton) and an eight-person rumble ensues. The fight is presented most effectively in the form of contemporary dance (Choreographer Felipe Pacheco), with shades of West Side Story. Lady Montague (Anna Macleod Franklin) lays down the law by talking of the Good Friday Agreement. Not in iambic pentameter but certainly within the spirit of the classic text.

We meet a sullen Romeo (Ryan Downey) clearly showing his depression, but even with the use of a head mic, some projection remains necessary, and Downey’s downcast mumbling sadly loses so much of his diction. This is to be a problem for much of the evening.

The Queen Mab story helps pick up the pace due to an energetic telling by Mercutio (Jenson Parker-Stone). Parker-Stone offers the performance of the night with fine singing and a spirit that lifts the production each time he is on stage. (What a shame his character gets killed off midway through the story.)

Romeo is broken out of his melancholy with one of the finest scenes – a three-part harmony rendition of Things Can Only Get Better – but the energy drops again for the Capulet’s party with little onstage movement. Even Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting and their sharing of the love sonnet doesn’t excite. Later the couple will perform a dumb show/slow dance (to The Cranberries poignant Zombie) as they spend their sole night together. Despite some good work from Francesca Eldred as Juliet, the couple together lack any sense of the joy of experiencing love for the first time. The spark isn’t there.

As the tragedy plays itself out, Ben Whitehead as the Friar, dressed in double denim, (Costumes Emma Lyth) exploits his inner Reverend Ian Paisley; Anna Macleod Franklin takes a second role as the totally loveable Nurse and beautifully sings Nanci Griffith’s I Would Bring You Ireland as the young lovers are married; and Faith Turner as Lady Capulet gives a fine performance with her argument with Juliet about marriage: the words truly coming from her heart not from the page.

This is a fine production for a summer’s evening. The use of popular music with adapted lyrics to illustrate the text works well – The Pogues’ Sally MacLennane is a fine example; the fight scenes are dramatically portrayed with energetic kicks and punches; and the adherence to much of the original words of Shakespeare, despite the transfer into modern day Northern Island, is praiseworthy. The production deserves to appeal to the widest audience.

 

 

Reviewed on 7th June 2023

by Phillip Money

Photography by Elliott Franks

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream | ★★★ | May 2022

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PAYNE: THE STARS ARE FIRE

Payne: The Stars are Fire

★★★

Jack Studio Theatre

PAYNE: THE STARS ARE FIRE

Payne: The Stars are Fire

Jack Studio Theatre

Reviewed – 27th January 2022

★★★

 

“As in the first play, the drama is broken up by balletic interludes, but less successfully than formerly”

 

And so on to the second play of the duology The Dyer’s Hand produced by Arrows & Traps Theatre Company, written and directed by Ross McGregor. A delightful opening scene serves as a link between the two plays in which Cecilia Payne (Laurel Marks), having completed her studies at Cambridge, informs the ageing Gustav Holst (Toby Wynn-Davies) that she is about to take up a research post at Harvard; an opportunity impossible for her as a woman to achieve in the UK.

With a soundtrack of jazz and blues, and an array of American accents, we arrive in 1920s USA. The set (Designer Odin Corie) is retained from the first play but with the music room paraphernalia replaced by the scientific. Harlow Shapley (Alex Stevens) with bow tie and bravado is the director of the new Harvard astronomy department and oversees the work of historical scientists Annie Jump Cannon (Cornelia Baumann), Adelaide Ames (Lucy Ioannou), Donald Menzel (Edward Spence) and the newly arrived Cecilia Payne. There is little sense of drama in the work they do – counting and cataloguing stars – but a running gag about whether Donald can have a cookie and some stoical one-liners from Annie show there are laughs to be had. Lucy Ioannou lights up the stage as Adelaide with an effervescent performance that provides welcome colour amidst the grey. Marks continues her good work from the first play, portraying Payne as ambitious but socially awkward. When Payne makes her ground-breaking astronomical discovery, she is reduced to tears of despair by top scientist Henry Russell (Toby Wynn-Davies) when we might have hoped she would stand up to be counted. Wynn-Davies, with a desperado moustache and softly spoken drawl, brilliantly plays Russell rather closer to Bond villain than senior astronomer.

As in the first play, the drama is broken up by balletic interludes, but less successfully than formerly. An extended dance sequence mourning the tragic death of Ames distracts from the main direction of the plot. A very well created cinematic cartoon of a car journey, excellently mimed by Marks, Spence and Ioannou, provides light relief but does not fit within the style of the rest of the production.

A flash forward at the end of the play shows us Payne finally being awarded the Professorship she has long craved, and the play reinforces the well-made message that women have been held back in the field of science through centuries of male tradition and misogyny. A late scene also links the two parts of this epic undertaking with Payne and Holst reunited to reminisce on the journeys they have undergone. With it comes the opportunity to show again the on-stage chemistry existing between Wynn-Davies and Marks.

 

Reviewed by Phillip Money

Photography by Davor @TheOcularCreative

 


Payne: The Stars are Fire

Jack Studio Theatre until 19th February

Payne: The Stars are Fire is part two of Arrows & Traps new repertory season: The Dyer’s Hand

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
Holst: The Music in the Spheres | ★★★★★ | January 2022

 

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