Shakespeare Bulletin

The Tobacco Factory in Bristol is a small, studio theater that has revamped its seating since the last time I visited it in 2011. Upon entering, I was instantly struck by the rows of bleacher seats that had cropped up along all four sides of the room. These had the effect of making the space seem smaller, presumably allowing more auditorium capacity, and confining the playing space to (mostly) an area within the four structural pillars in the middle of the room. In the past, these pillars greatly inhibited sightlines, as the action used to flow within a much wider playing area. But with more audience members in the room, there is more that can go somewhat awry—and the night I saw Romeo and Julietwas one such night.

Rarely have I experienced a more peculiar collection of watchers in any auditorium than on this occasion. There was the bloke on the front row who frequently reached for the crinkly sweets in his pocket; a group of high school students on the front two rows who found much of the first half derisorily funny; another man who made the most extraordinary “huh” noises quite often—and not at anything that I could discern as remotely abnormal. After curtain call, one member of a school group said as they passed me, “That was awful. I thought it would never end.” I disagree, not least because the playing time had been cut to under two [End Page 690]and a half hours, but I still couldn’t wait to get out of the theater and away from all the distraction that clearly pulled everyone out of the story the cast was trying to tell.

According to the extensive programme notes, director Polina Kalinina had decided to set Shakespeare’s play in 1968, using the student unrest in Europe as its backdrop. Costumes and hairstyles suitably evoked the era, and the action began with the Chorus replaced by a lone young woman entering and walking onto the battered merry-go-round that was the sole set piece in the first half, singing an arrangement of a sonnet. She was joined by a chorus of voices offstage, so that what had begun as a lullaby finished as a protest song and led to the student violence that followed. The rival factions of Capulet and Montague spilled onto the stage, dismantling the bars of the playground equipment to make lethal weapons. Quite what these Shakespearean students of 1968 were protesting against was never made clear.

Nevertheless, Kalinina’s stagecraft was faultless and she expanded the small scale into the epic with a few flourishes that kept the story moving at a clip (helped along by judicious cutting). The production was less successful at fully exploring character, which made it difficult for me ultimately to fall for it. Both leads acquitted themselves admirably, however; having watched Paapa Essiedu many times excel himself in Sam Mendes’s King Learat the National last summer in the thankless part of the Duke of Burgundy, it was especially exciting to watch him tackle Romeo with aplomb. As Shakespeare’s eponymous hero, Essiedu presented us with a gawky, cocky teen who grew to manhood during the course of the play. His physical energy was that of a restless youth who had trouble staying still. This Romeo would lean with his back against a pillar and prowl excitedly around the space when talking about his love. Essiedu played Romeo as a man who was tenderly enamoured of Juliet (Fig.8), and his grief as he cradled her body in the...