Somewhere in the south of Cardiff, a single dad has fallen asleep in a café and a budding physics student is trying to study. It’s boy meets girl except the boy, Romy is sleep-deprived and covered in vomit and the girl, Julie, is busy dreaming of a life in Cambridge once she finishes her A-Levels.
Such is the set-up for Gary Owen’s Romeo and Julie, a loose (very loose) adaptation of the Bard’s classic tome of forbidden love that trades in Verona for Splott; a small, down-and-out suburb on the outskirts of the Welsh capital.
Romy (Damon Baudin) isn’t a Montague, just an 18-year-old trying to be the best father he can in a cramped bedsit despite his alcoholic mother, Barb (Belinda McClory). Julie (Shontane Farmer) isn’t a Capulet, just a confident sixteen-year-old shouldering the ambitions of her parents for a better life. They fall in love, all the same, of course. A love that, over a languorous – though at times affecting – two hours and forty minutes, we watch turn to tragedy.
Owens is no stranger to revisiting classic texts. His wildly successful Iphigenia in Splott – returning to Red Stitch after a sold-out season later this year – used Euripides’ myth to offer a fiery indictment of the ways healthcare systems fail working class women. Romeo and Julie presents a similarly biting class-commentary, it just goes about it a bit more quietly.
Ultimately the tragedy of these star-crossed lovers comes from the subtle difference in class between them. Julie, played with a child-like confidence by Farmer, is smart enough to humour the possibility of an upward mobility that her parents and Romy simply can’t. Though her love for Romy and his little Niamh grows, it can’t resolve this essential difference – the star-crossed lovers stay doomed.
This is a sturdy staging from Red Stitch Actor’s Studio but it’s limited by its faithfulness to Owens’ script. Where Owens’ Iphigenia thrilled with a plot that moved with breakneck speed, Romeo and Julie drags its feet lazily over storylines and character arcs. Scenes are long, and meandering, doggedly committed to a naturalism that this production leans into.
Owen’s naturalism is pulled from the kitchen-sink realism popular in Britain during the 1960s; a trend that saw middle-class experiences or lower-class experiences written by upper-class writers often unfairly touted as representative of wider class struggle. Soapy classics like Eastenders were inspired by these dramas. But his script – and this adaptation – leans into moments of Eastenders-like schmaltz too often, just when you wish they’d subvert them.
It’s 2024, and much of these story beats are so familiar as to be boring. Fight scenes between the hard-headed Julie and her parents seemed pulled out of a Netflix Original rather than a richly thought-out drama, unhelped by overly explicit gestures and exaggerated reactions from some in the cast (all of which sport thick Aussie accents).
The show’s original staging mitigated the possibility for melodrama with formally experimental staging – hanging fluorescent tubing and near-Brechtian staging – but director Kamarra Bell-Wykes has favoured naturalism across the board.
Sophie Woodward’s moveable set replicates a claustrophobic bedsit with incredible detail: washed out yellow walls and utilitarian furniture an effective, if unsubtle, representation of the restrictions of class these characters are forced to navigate. But its explicitness builds on a similarly explicit script that ends up pulling the show dangerously close to soap-opera.
Predictable emotional beats and saccharine lines are unhelpfully highlighted, overshadowing moments and commentary that are contrastingly more complex or emotionally nuanced – Barb’s growing fondness for her granddaughter, for example, or the pressures of care work experienced by Julie’s mum (introduced in a monologue Claudia Greenstone delivers beautifully).
Of the cast, only McClory and Baudin manage to avoid slipping into the overtly dramatic by favouring more subtle physicality and – with McClory especially – a down-to-earth bearing that makes their characters feel lived-in and, most importantly, disguises predictable moments in the script that are too explicit or explicitly sentimental.
It’s a double bind. In leaning into Owens’ naturalism, this production amplifies the emotional resonance of his writing. But by the same token, it exaggerates these resonances in way that unhelpfully oversaturates the already overly long show in easy sentimentality.
Sound designers small sound underscore scenes with melodious piano trills that nearly lulls you into a calming quietude, but, when paired with splashes of melodrama among the cast, transforms into one more soap-opera trope: another example of a production leaning too hard on rote emotional beats.
Ultimately there’s a balance needed here that the show I caught didn’t quite manage. Still, I’m hopeful the cast will sit into the script’s subtlety with time. Owens remains one of our foremost playwrights offering considered portrayals of class that thrum with an arresting reality that is impossible not to be affected by. And Eastenders is on Binge.
Romeo and Julie
Red Stitch Theatre, Rear 2 Chapel Street, St Kilda East
Performance: Thursday 25 July 2024
Season continues to 18 August 2024
Information and Bookings: www.redstitch.net
Image: Belinda McClory and Damon Baudin in Romeo and Julie – photo by Jodie Hutchinson
Review: Guy Webster