Ignore the buzz: Robert Icke’s new production of Romeo and Juliet is actually as good as people say it is. To a reviewer who glories in pointing out errors and condemning monstrous innovations, here we have an old classic presented afresh, lovingly handled rather than treated with the kid gloves of an archivist.
There are twenty million ways of doing Shakespeare wrongly – some modes of which have become so commonplace as to have reached the age of being unvenerable traditions in their own right. Most prominent among these is the Romantic interpretation that sees this play as the apex of tragic beauty. I have never been one for the beauty of failure. Failure sucks. Shakespeare agrees with me, as this play is not a glorification of teenage love but a very clear and blatant condemnation of passions untempered, unchallenged and unmastered. Romeo and Juliet is not a celebration of emotions but the shining of a bright light upon their dangers. It is not that physical desire is inherently bad – we must never give in to puritanism – but that here is a supreme example of when teenage lust should have been channelled into a more ordered love.
