Charming lovers redeem raucous staging designed to upset purists

ROMEO AND JULIET Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

SINCE becoming artistic director of English National Opera last year, Daniel Kramer has promised to infuse it with new energy. His career in the theatre certainly hasn’t lacked ambition — and for his counterpart at the Globe, Emma Rice, he’s an apt and also bold choice to launch her second (and final) season.

Kramer’s take on Romeo And

Juliet is the opposite of polite. With emphatic nods to A Clockwork Orange and a soundtrack at times aggressively over-amplified, it’s a riot of noise and wild physicality. Violent and irreverent, it seems calculated to upset the purists. It’s surely no coincidence it contains the elements that led last year to Rice’s much-debated disagreements with the Globe’s board.

Usually a female Mercutio (Golda Rosheuvel) would be regarded as a talking point, but it’s small beer in a madly inventive show that includes gyrating dancers with nipple tassels, grotesque clowning and Juliet’s father dressed as a dinosaur and singing the Village People’s YMCA.

Kramer’s approach makes Baz Luhrmann’s great Nineties film of Shakespeare’s tragedy look sedate. Yet it doesn’t advance a coherent sense of the play, and the urge to milk every comic possibility robs the story of pathos, at least until its very end.

Much of the time this interpretation is too raucously silly to be emotionally engaging. Its main redeeming feature is the chemistry between the leads. Edward Hogg’s Romeo sports massive headphones and munches Doritos, yet has a strange, slippery magnetism. Kirsty Bushell’s Juliet is more grounded — earthy and appealing. Their most intimate moments together have charm and real tenderness. But playing so many scenes for laughs means this is mostly a shallow and exhausting experience.

Until July 9 (020 7401 9919, shakespearesglobe.com)