Romeo and Juliet

O’Connor’s Romeo first glimpses Buckley’s Juliet through the smoky air at a party, Verona’s 1% cavorting around him in Venetian carnival masks. Godwin has Juliet singing in this sequence, raising her hands to her face as she breathes into a microphone. While this scene doesn’t look as awkwardly depopulated as party scenes can so often look on stage, it also inevitably can’t match the flamboyance and spectacle of Baz Luhrmann’s party scene (against which all R&J party scenes - especially those on screen - must be measured). In these moments, the limitations of shooting in a single location are most keenly felt.

Buckley is a charismatic and collected Juliet, while O’Connor is a confident Romeo, albeit one who does not look like he would know how to handle a flick knife. Though their ages can be jarring, they play the intensity and absorption rather than the gaucheness of teenage lovers; they capture their character’s infatuation, their sex-struck captivation, nuzzling each other as they sit in a sea of candles, tracing each other’s faces in the bedroom afterglow.

Benvolio (Shubham Saraf) is equally entranced by Mercutio (Fisayo Akinade) and they even share a kiss. In their brief scenes together, they display palpable chemistry and, when it comes, Akinade’s Mercutio has an effectively low-key death scene, his life leaking from him as he spits out his curses while a distraught Benvolio tries to rouse him.

Reconceived for the screen and condensed to 90 minutes, Emily Burns’ adaptation emphasises the dizzying speed with which characters travel from marriage bed to death bed. She also draws out some interesting ideas, highlighting the unseemly haste with which Romeo dismisses, and presumably ghosts, poor Rosalind. He is depicted as the epitome of the posh boy, moving from woman to woman, obsessing over each of them.

Nor does the adaptation shy away from the inwardness of the young and privileged, with Juliet less concerned by the sudden wave of bloodshed than she is by Romeo’s banishment, but it also makes plain that they are enabled and encouraged in their actions by the adults around them. In particular, the film foregrounds Greig’s Lady Capulet. Greig – who previously played Malvolia in Godwin’s Twelfth Night at the NT – relishes this, bringing a steely, machiavellian quality to a character who is often quite nothing-y. Greig’s Lady Capulet is the chief engineer of her daughter’s unhappiness, forcing her into a marriage with Paris while still clad in mourning black. She stands by unmoved as Buckley writhes on the floor, distraught before pleading with her to delay the marriage. Greig is majestically ice-hearted, but there’s also something uncomfortable about the way the production ladles blame on to the figure of the monstrous mother.

Msamati and Deborah Findlay are typically solid in the roles of Friar Lawrence and the Nurse. Lester tops and tails things with fitting gravitas as the Prince.

Director of photography Tim Sidell captures the close-up intimacy of fingers intertwining, and employs expressive use of shadow, while the music by Michael Bruce is evocative and ethereal, a little reminiscent of Radiohead’s Exit Music. But, in common with the majority of productions of this perennial set text, the film cannot resist making the death scene beautiful. As is customary, the lovers expire cleanly with not a trace of blood and vomit, amid candles and flowers. I long for a production that goes down a different road.

Overall, though, this filmed staging feels like more than just a way of continuing to make work in a pandemic. It uses its limitations creatively, making a feature of them, and would make a good teaching resource. It plucks out interesting threads of the text and the performances are rich and poised – particularly Buckley’s.

Godwin is a director of clarity and sheen, if not adventurousness, and, if that’s what you want from your Shakespeare, it delivers. This adaptation succeeds on its own terms; though it works on screen, it remains rooted in the theatre, a film with the stage in its veins.