Tom Holland in Romeo and Juliet review: The star is not to blame, but this production-cum-global-event is 'lifeless' (2024)

Few theatre shows have ever generated as much hype as this new take on Shakespeare's love story featuring the Gen Z icon, which is being staged in London. Unfortunately, though, it's sunk by gimmicky, oppressively dour staging.

Theatre is necessarily a pretty localised art form, so it's remarkable to see a single production attain the status of a global event. Yet that, undoubtedly, is what a new take on Romeo and Juliet in London's West End has become, thanks to one of its leads – a certain Spider-Man, Tom Holland. You can feel the effect of Holland's very special aura of Gen Z mega-celebrity in the particular hubbub in the audience before the play starts, and you can certainly feel it afterwards, in the unprecedented scenes outside the Duke of York's Theatre, where hundreds of fans teem behind railings, waiting for a glimpse of Holland as he travels from stage door to his car, waving like royalty.

If only the show itself was able to match this energy. Unfortunately, though, it's a depressingly lifeless affair, which somehow manages to be both overstated and underpowered. This, it should be emphasised, is in no way the fault of the actors – neither Holland, who is fine, nor Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, playing Juliet, who is better than fine, nor the supporting cast. The problemlies firmly with the gimmicky, oppressively dour staging, which consistently works against all of them.

If hardly on Holland levels, director Jamie Lloyd is a box-office draw himself: one of very few "name" theatre makers, who has become known for minimalistic reimaginings of classics featuring dressed-down A-listers. These include recent spins on A Doll's House, with Jessica Chastain, The Seagull, with Emilia Clarke, and, last autumn, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard, with Nicole Scherzinger; the latter, after earning raves in the UK capital, is heading for Broadway in the autumn.

The danger is, however, that what seems radical first or second time around can quickly become formulaic – and there is a sense of slightly weary predictability about being greeted on arrival by a bare stage, except for metal fencing and microphone stands, while a grinding industrial electronic soundscape blares through the speakers. Oh, and centre stage, there are giant floor-standing letters spelling out the play's location, Verona. Things do not get more subtle from thereon in.

Where it goes wrong

What really sinks things is the continuous use of live camerawork, with the actors followed by camera operators all around the building – even, at one point, up to the Duke of York's roof – and footage blown up onto a big screen. It is a now increasingly familiar device of modern theatre, that Lloyd himself deployed in Sunset Boulevard, and can be effective if it has a clear point – see Sydney Theatre Company's ingenious, one-person adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, just seen in the West End with Succession star Sarah Snook, which used a whole fleet of cameras to help the audience access the character's narcissistic state of being, among other things.

But here, there is dubious thematic purpose to the cinematography and it instead begs the question: what exactly is the point of theatre that is so desperate to ape TV and film? Rather than the thrill of an unmediated live experience, the audience is dislocated from the performers, the performers are dislocated from each other, and there is little sense of a coherent world in which the characters exist.

Take the scene where Romeo first catches sight of Juliet at a party: here Holland alone is on stage, gazing at Amewudah-Rivers on the screen, where she is being streamed from the unprepossessing locale of the Duke of York's theatre lobby – not exactly a great stand-in for the Capulets' ballroom. In the process, what should be an electric moment of love at first sight is divested of its spark.

Indeed,cameras aside, it's noticeable how little the actors are allowed to organically interact: in other moments, they're made to use those microphones and/or stand side by side, facing out to the audience, declaiming their lines, not looking at each other. It makes events often unbearably static, to the point of it being a slog, despite the significant textual cuts that have reduced it to a relatively brisk two-hour-and-15-minute running time. The nadir comes in the completely undynamic rendering of the climactic mid-way fight scene, which sees the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt: here there is no physicality whatsoever, just a snap blackout, before the characters magically appear again newly bloodied.

A glum mood

With his black-box set, constant, sinisterly humming sound design, and stark lighting, Lloyd seems to also want to make Romeo and Juliet into some kind of nihilistic horror – draining the love story of the light and shade that it should have before it draws to its tragic ending. Holland's performance particularly suffers, you sense, from being in hock to this determinedly downbeat aesthetic. He has definite stage presence, but a habit of acting out one mood at a time, rather than making his Romeo convincingly psychologically rounded, and towards the end he is reduced to snarling disaffection, Romeo's emotional tenderness all but forgotten.

Relative newcomer Amewudah-Rivers, by contrast, transcends her glum surroundings and is the real saving grace: she has a conversational command of the verse common to the best Shakespearean actors, as well as a natural wit, which is deployed particularly well in the early courtship scenes. Matching her is former Doctor Who assistant Freema Agyeman, a radiantly warm, comic delight as Juliet's Nurse. Indeed it is Amewudah-Rivers and Agyeman's scenes together, in which they banter with sisterly chemistry, that are truly this production's beating heart – which is not what Shakespeare may have intended, but there you go.

Rumours have suggested the show will transfer to New York, and I hope, whatever the real deficiencies of this Romeo and Juliet, that the Holland effect might inspire a new generation of theatregoers, not to mention Shakespeare lovers. Except unfortunately, this feels like self-hating theatre, that believes screens are all and has no real faith in the inherent value of its own art form.Think of it more as an immersive satire on the state of the arts, perhaps, and it hits the spot rather better.

Romeo and Juliet is at the Duke of York's Theatre until 3 August.

★★☆☆☆

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