It didn’t just rain talent at the open-air production of
Romeo and Juliet – it simply poured!
Everywhere you looked there was talent in
abundance at the performance by the Playgoers Society of Dartington Hall, which
on the night I saw it, was tested to the limit by the weather.
Forced indoors from the lush private garden after an
irritating shower became a steady downpour, the excellent cast who hadn’t
flinched in the rain, kept their heads to produce a moving climax in the most
trying of circumstances.
When director Mavis Jones could have been tearing her hair
out with frustration, she was all calm authority, pulling the strings of a
production that teemed with energy and wit, yet ultimately proved profoundly
moving.
The darkening skies were somehow a fitting backdrop for the
tale as Romeo and Juliet is so much more than a love story; it is the
underpinning and unravelling of a feud, from which the doomed affair blossoms.
As such it has a resonance that echoes through the centuries
with its futility, its fractious edge, its simmering violence.
In such an atmosphere how can love survive? There is no
chance for Romeo and Juliet as signalled by the blood red roses at the back of
the acting space.
The actors commanded their stage, from the dignity of Tom
Andrew’s Prince, to the Northern bluntness of Charlie Lewis’s friar. Luke
Trebilcock was an athletic touchy-feely Mercutio, forever getting in the faces
of the irksome enemy, while the wonderful Brenda Loosemore stole scene after
scene as Juliet’s devoted nurse, sometimes bawdy, sometimes bawling.
It is easy to forget that, in the first half especially, it
is a very sexy play, and in the two principals the Playgoers were fortunate to
have a couple who plainly liked the look of each other (which is not always the
case).
As fortunes fool, Calum Guthrie was a testosterone-fuelled
Romeo mixing devotion and anger in equal measure.
Jess Plummer captured Juliet’s essential innocence, but did
need to remember the proverbial old lady in the back row who couldn’t hear so
well.
Memories to take away: the brooding, hooded finale, the
sweeping movement and anger of the fights, Luke Trebilcock’s eloquent body
language, Derfek Chapman’s stoicism as Capulet when the worst of the rains came-
and the balcony scene.
Can there ever have been such a beautiful setting for
Shakespeare’s immortal words?
Richard Davies
