A Red Nose Day sketch of a Shakespeare

★★

‘That’ll teach ’em” seems to be the provocative and in my view profoundly tedious message that rings out loud and clear from this brash opening salvo to Emma Rice’s second, and final, season as artistic director at Shakespeare’s Globe.

It’s not Rice who directs Romeo and Juliet (she unveils her Twelfth Night in May). Instead Daniel Kramer, the willing and reasonably able controversialist who runs ENO, performs the role of attack dog, cocking his leg and doing his anti-traditionalist business in the courtyard.

Kramer has apparently taken his cue from the line “Oh I am Fortune’s fool”. We’re in a world of grotesque clowns; Verona is a circus of the damned. If grime music be the food of hipster cred (a signature feature of Imogen, last autumn’s abysmal Cymbeline reworking), here’s another barrage. The strobes work over-time as Capulets and Montagues (in Clockwork Orange- style goon clobber) enact a stylised opening dance-off. In a gaping grave two armoured cartoonish warriors pummel each other, this orgy of caricature violence topped by an OTT fusillade of red ribbons.

Laugh? I nearly wept. I nearly yawned. Those who like their Shakespeare irreverent with a capital “I” will whoop. A glitter-ball descends during the Capulet ball for a round of the Village People’s YMCA – the guests in outlandish fancy-dress. Coo – or “woo”, as Kirsty Bushell’s enervating, rather past-the-first-flush Juliet likes to interject, just in case the ear is tiring of boring old Shakespeare. A fright with her rouge-spots and Kate from The Shrew- shrieking, Bushell is so liberated-acting it’s a wonder she doesn’t just tell her father to eff off.

When it calms down, scintillas of truth and beauty do emerge, but they’re all too soon lost in the engulfing directorial egotism. I was almost moved by the ending but the toy-gun of Edward Hogg’s Romeo (yes, he actually goes around saying “bangbang”), combined with Bushell’s near 19th-century histrionics, made me feel as though I had just spent two hours watching a failed Red Nose Day sketch.