Romeo and Juliet – Stratford East, London

The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is one of the best-known of Shakespearean passages. It contains a reference to the play’s duration as “the two hours’ traffic of our stage,” but it’s rare for a modern performance to honour that time limit. It is remarkable, then, that Kwame Owusu’s sleek adaptation manages to pack everything into a 90-minute, interval-free thrill ride – and still have time left over for several dance sequences.

This production sprinkles a handful of professional actors among young artists and community performers, in a collaboration between the community and participation teams at both Stratford East and Sadler’s Wells. The action mainly takes place in a Verona that’s bustling with nightlife, where everybody hangs out at the dance club known as Cap’s Bar (ruled over by Natasha Lewis’s fiery Lady Capulet) and the post-party fast food is served in the Montagues’ place, Monty’s Taco Bar. Liam Bunster’s design makes heavy use of roll-up shutters in its industrial aesthetic, exposing and hiding key set details as needed.

It is in this landscape that Dhruv Bhudia’s earnestly romantic Romeo first gatecrashes a Cap’s Bar party, hoping to find Rosaline but finding his destiny in her cousin Juliet (Shakira Paulas) instead. The nightclub setting, already established in the play’s opening as the location for Act I’s opening thumb-biting confrontation, allows for co-director Malik Nashad Sharpe’s ensemble choreography work to involve the whole company fully. Styles from ballroom and street repertoires mix with disco moves to emphasise the general party spirit.

And yet those segments are not the most impressive dance moments. Whenever Bhudia and Paulas are wooing each other, we get a second Romeo and Juliet in the form of dancers Louis Donovan and Praeploy Pam Tomuan. Their graceful, romantic pas de deux routines express the couple’s inner thoughts – Rodgers and Hammerstein would be proud to see their use of dream ballets echoed so effectively here.

Mixing such contemporary trappings with Shakespearean dialogue is no easy task; the ease and haste with which marriages can be arranged and performed sit uneasily with a 21st-century London vibe. So too, the arcane dialogue occasionally stumbles in the mouths of its young performers. While Bhudia excels at allowing the Shakespearean language to inhabit his character, especially in his many scenes with Michael Grady-Hall’s Brother Laurence, Paulas’s Juliet is not always able to achieve the same sense of accomplishment. 

But the young lovers do work well together, and help to lead this cast of mixed abilities, training and background to a creation of Romeo and Juliet that speaks to both the playwright’s era and the times in which it is performed. With the production topped and tailed by Louise Rowe’s DJ giving us that famous prologue – first as warning, then as elegy – Owusu delivers a dynamic, fulfilling adaptation. It makes one wonder if any production should ever take up, much less exceed, those promised two hours ever again.

Runs until 9 August 2025