Writer: William Shakespeare
Adaptor and Director: Karl Falconer
This inventive, topical adaptation of Shakespeare’s famous love story emphasises the play’s ubiquitous violence, the culpability of the adults involved, and the fact that Juliet was only 13. It starts with a shocking crime report: two dead teenagers, one of them wanted for double murder (and did he kill his underage girlfriend too?) Romeo. Juliet replaces “and” with a dot, suggesting the characters’ alienation and perhaps the corrosive horrors of the internet age. The play is part of the Old Red Lion’s SHAKEFEST, which includes a musical based on Pericles and a two-woman Hamlet.
Tesni Docherty-Bowen is outstanding as a luminous Juliet, her youth reinforced by school uniform and body language. James Sprague is an amiable, troubled Romeo. Amber King plays Juliet’s sprightly nurse and lanyard-bearing Escalus, the play’s despairingly powerless authority figure. Philippe Noel Rose is compelling as Romeo’s borderline-unhinged friend Mercutio.
The costumes are contemporary and digital imagery is incorporated into Holly Carver’s designs for the staging. Romeo’s first infatuation, Rosaline, seems to be an internet porn star. The young men roam the streets of First-Person-Shooter video games, the teenage lovers message each other (“wher4 rt thou r0meo?”) and communicate with dodgy “Friar” Lawrence via an online relationship advice portal. Sometimes it’s unclear whether characters are meeting in real life or virtually.
Adaptor-director Karl Falcolner, who plays both Lawrence and bullying Capulet brilliantly, has inevitably cut large sections of text but leaves in extended lyrical speeches that speak to this dark reading of the play. Romeo’s worried father (also Philippe Noel Rose) describes how his troubled son sits alone in his bedroom, curtains drawn:
“Away from light steals home my heavy son
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night.”
There are numerous lines like this that justify an interpretation of Romeo and Juliet as a play about the toxic radicalisation of young men and the exploitation of girls. The aggressive, sexualised banter of Romeo and his friends feels freshly minted. Where the play is less successful is in sections of added text whose contemporary register jars with Shakespeare’s poetry. Juliet’s other suitor Paris didn’t want to play football with his dad; Lady Capulet was trafficked; Juliet’s dad began the feud with Montague to distract from his fertility issues… Jasmine McIvor as both the mothers and Charlie Forrest as Benvolio/Paris are moving and engaging, but these modern sections sit uncomfortably alongside the original late-16th-century verse. It feels like that awful bit in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Willy Wonka is given an invented backstory with a dad who is a dentist.
The idea that Shakespeare’s play has been misread for centuries is weakened by these interpolated lines, especially when the star-crossed teens start waving knives at each other (“Fuck you, no fuck you”) in between quoting lines of deathless love poetry. The show’s added frame, a sweetly told story of young love that is real and passionate in its innocence, just adds to the confusion. Robert Icke’s recent Romeo and Juliet, which also had experimental elements, raised Juliet’s age to 16 to avoid modern audiences fixating on the character’s underage status. In Romeo. Juliet, her age is central to a disturbing retelling of the story through a fragmenting contemporary lens.
Based in north-west England, PurpleDoor theatre company launched in 2008. Their goals, to look again at classic plays and involve talented local actors, are excellent. There is plenty here to engage new audiences, like pulsing dance sections and visceral fight scenes, choreographed by Movement Director Meredith Lewis. The cast and crew are talented, and it will be interesting to see what they tackle next.
Reviewed on 29 August 2026.
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
