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Has the conveyor belt from screen-to-stage celebrity turned full circle when a star from a hit TV series steps on to the West End stage in a production that is running contemporaneously with a stage adaptation of that same TV series? Sadie Sink, better known to Stranger Things fans as Max Mayfield, performed her West End debut while Stranger Things: First Shadow played up the road, at the Phoenix theatre, in a prequel to the Duffer Brothers’ series.
It may seem like the Netflixification of the West End, but Sink actually began life as a theatre actor – and earned a Tony nomination for Broadway’s run of John Proctor is a Villain, currently at the Royal Court for its London run.
Here she plays Juliet in Robert Icke’s hipsterishly modern dress production of Shakespeare’s doomed love story. Noah Jupe, who started as a child actor on screen, also makes his West End debut as her Romeo.
Icke has proven himself an intelligent interpreter of the classics, most recently in an exquisitely rendered version of Oedipus, in the West End. He does not quite hit the devastating pitch perfection of that show here, although there is plenty of invention in this production.
Too much so, perhaps. There is a blizzard of directorial flourishes, some of which have been seen before – such as the clock that marks the tragic inevitability of this story projected on to a screen, and beeping its hours and seconds intermittently. It is reminiscent of the clock that counted down the minutes to Sophoclean doom in Oedipus, this time running forward from Sunday night, when Romeo spots Juliet at the Capulets’ ball, to Wednesday night, when they are both found dead in the Capulets’ tomb.
Except that this ending is far from conventional, and schmaltzy too. Another motif is a recap of certain scenes that show a possible alternative universe in which the couple’s tragic fate is averted. One features Juliet being swept away from Romeo before their meeting, another is of the nurse running away from Romeo before she delivers Juliet’s offer of marriage. These come with explosions of light followed by darkness, and seem like photographic shots of memory.
Icke disposes of Shakespeare’s opening prologue, instead featuring Juliet, in bed, eyes wide, with what seems like a nightmare enacted around her that takes in the opening fracas between servants. “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” says Montague servant, Abraham (Alex Felton), and lunges zombie-like towards his enemy, whom he kisses. It strains under the weight of directorial overthinking, although some eliding of scenes work well, such as bringing together the death of Tybalt (Aruna Jalloh) and subsequent banishment of Romeo, with Juliet’s hope over her new, secret marriage to him. This juxtaposition of love and violence, hope and despair, underlines the ill-fated timing of their union.
What makes the production effective, ultimately, in spite of the overbearing directorial stamp, are the two central performances. Sink makes for an intense teenager, quirkily neurotic, who brings comedy to the balcony scene. She is so strong a presence that Juliet at times seems the play’s central protagonist. Jupe’s Romeo is dramatically mopey in his unrequited love for Rosaline at the start, and earnest in his passion for Juliet. They have a sweet, pure chemistry that encapsulates the urgent and uncompromising nature of first love, so absolute in its adolescent ardour that it is worth dying for. Both speak the poetry of the verse without straining for effect, too.
There is also a storming turn by Clare Perkins who makes a brilliantly cocky cockney nurse, kissing her lips in annoyance. Kasper Hilton-Hille makes a distinctive Mercutio too – an antic mischief-maker with a tendency towards performing moonies.
A bed is central to Hildegard Bechtler’s stage design, wheeled on to remind us this is a story of star-crossed passion. No contemporary message around the love or conflict has been filleted from it. The sound design by Giles Thomas carries a portentous single held note in its effective moments but spa-like ambient music in others. A burst of The Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays as Juliet takes the potion that will induce a coma imitating death seems wholly unnecessary.
The fateful foreshadowing is amped up to full-on horror tropes by Icke. Gothic shadows are thrown across the stage, jump scares come with jagged sound and light (the latter designed by Jon Clark), and the digital clock comes to resemble that in Danny Robbins’ West End ghost story, 2.22. It is Shakespeare turned into West End melodrama. Thank god for the celebrity castings, which saves it from itself.
