Romeo and Juliet at the National

Or: Palm to Palm

Now this is what we should have been doing all along.

The National Theater of Britain rather than try to put together a zoom production or stage something before the cameras have instead (privileged doubtless by their resources) to try a new form that is wild and enrapturing and fits the mark perfectly. Over the course of seventeen days (and doubtless a bit of quarantine before) fourteen actors bubbled together and in the cavernous halls of the theater put on Romeo and Juliet for the cameras. We see a great stage door sliding shut on them in the beginning, the oven door closing on a white hot drama. The camera (with a tactful intimacy by Tim Sidell) follows close as skin to the actors as we see them grow their performances in playful mercurialness of rehearsal to the full blooded heft of Director Simon Godwin’s production.

I keep a special place in my heart for R&J. Problematic it may be, but its language, its twists of misfortune so ground glass fine that no matter how amateurish the production, I’m always in my seat with a will, eager to watch some suffering. And I would raise the National’s pandemic offering as better than any filmed version you would care to name. This is not lost in lavish presentation, nor tripping in the train of its romance. This R&J cuts right to the bone of beautiful language and naked need.

Its most present in the touches savored by our star-crossed pair (Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley). We first see them on different sides of the rehearsal room, smiling shyly, perhaps even cheekily at each other. As actors acting as actors, they broadcast a very clear thought of “Gosh. I’m sure glad it’s you I get to play with.” As Juliet and Romeo they are utterly enchanted, moonstruck, by each other. They seem incapable of being together without entwining fingers, or tentatively nuzzling each other, or tracing the line of a jaw or the hollow of a throat with finger tip. And, being touched starved as we are, collectively, is breath taking in a way that, however hot and heavy Buckley and O’Connor get, never seems base or lustful. When was the last time you touched someone like that?

The camera work is loving (though the music is a little much and the masked ball entirely too close and sweaty to be viewed without palpitations of anxiety. Six Feet!) and Godwin’s centering of events are brilliantly elegant (a brutal knife fight in an ally way, maligned mantua as a sealed, sun streaked vault, a parade of nightmares by the cast in a band of chairs around a bed) it is Emily Burns’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s verse that sings most sweetly. She has pulled so many subtle elisions that the whole concept flows like water, brining it to a neat hour and a half and creating a flawless through line.

Burns also unfurled some marvelous plots all of her own. We find that is Lady Capulet (Tamsin Greig) who is the head of the household, plotting her enemies downfall and her daughter’s marriage with icey control. The famous “Art thou not proud?” Speech, generally carte blanket for flying spittle, is rendered with withering quietness (that’s another brilliant thing, the quiet. The camera’s closeness allows for murmured intimacy and steely white hot rage, that would never play on stage.) Her withering dissection of her daughter, barbed here and there with a dry chuckle, leaves Juliet a screaming wreck. It’s too great actors playing off each other.

Another nice (though not unstrained) device is the romance between Benvolio (Shubham Saraf) and Mercurio (Fisayo Akinade). Their easy tactile connection is also well observe d(though not by Romeo, who remains hilariously oblivious). Even the etherial, candle strain marriage of the leads is interlaced by the two men sharing a tender kiss in an alley. Or the heartbreaking work of Saraf in the aftermath of the bloody struggle. Cradeling his lover’s body you can see, and moreover feel, his tremors as he tries to hold himself together for a clear and unheated report on his cousins behalf, even though he is about to fly apart with grief.

I almost wish Saraf and O’Connor had swapped rolls. Despite his obvious chemistry with his costar, O’Connor seems like he’s been left in the was and both his appearance and performance have come out wet and wrinkly. Saraf has an equal depth of feeling and a playfulness with langue. O'Connor nails the wan love sickness, and his violent bursts are terrifyingly grabbing (For example his first suicide attempt, only saved by Friar Laurence, talked back from the edge by Lucian Msamti’s fresh and clear and careful discovery of each line, a smilers pour of verse rather than a torrent). But Romeo can’t go in-between the two. The confrontation with Tybalt (David Judge, absolutely magnetic in his glance and a thing of beauty with a knife) comes entirely out of left field (granted, Shakespeare did him no favors) and his resigned surrender seems so mocking that its no wonder Tybalt tries to kill him (or for giving him so little to act against).

The times O’Connor comes alive is when he’s exposed to Buckley’s warmth. The “found footage” scenes of the actors chasing each other around, or his less than graceful attempts to climb the balcony show him grinning like a schoolboy, or totally lost in awe in her presence. He even pulls off a heartbreaking joyful grin stretched into a rictus by poison as he gazes on her face whilst dying.

I cannot fault O’Connor for not giving enough. The play really ought to be called Juliet, since she carries the story and has the lions share of performance and is, you know, sympathetic (too much bad poetry Ro-bow, too much). And Buckley gives us the depth and intimacy and thought-out brilliance and untamable feeling of a Lear.

This is not some light hearted, too young thing who finds herself too deep and kills herself. Buckley makes it very clear that her Juliet has been walking at the bottom of the ocean, devoid of light and under impossible pressure all her life, for nearly thirty years (another beautiful elision on Burns’s part.) When we see her on the balcony, she’s not dreamily balanced over the railing. She’s crouched down, hunkered, behind the bars, confused and self-loathing and frightened with the size and power of her feelings and how horrible a pickle she’s in. When she’s waiting for her wedding night she doesn’t lounge languidly. She’s bent prostrate, back arched, hands clenched, in the most unrestful child’s pose, out of her mind with horniness and frustration with the universe. “Gallop a pace you fiery footed steeds” she growls, growls!, in Buckley’s creamy Irish voice. She might as well be Lady M calling down spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, so vicious is her incantations (though she is definitely not asking them to unsex her.)

Buckley knows her character to a T, and can carry even a virtual audience from the point were we look and say, “My, she’s good, she’s really crying” to sobbing and clutching our mouths along with her. She stutters, ever so slightly, when overcome, scrambling to pick up her words in times of exultation or devastation. And she’s no wilting violet, despite her smallness before When she meets Count Paris (Alex Mugnaioni) you can feel the tension in her garrote tight but subdued answers and start to wonder if she won’t change track and kill her hated suitor right there. The slow purpose in which she wipes his unwanted kiss off her lips sets up entirely that taking her life is no sudden concept for her. It’s very much on the table for her and has been for a long time.

The filmed version would have been a stunner if it was before a live audience. But the pandemic has forced it into a diamond, delivering a masterful production at so close a range we can feel the lovers gasping breaths on our own skin. Gripping and entrancing and elegantly brilliant it delivers everything we’ve been craving for a year without the theater, and other treasures we didn’t even know we were missing.