Romeo And Juliet as you’ve never seen it before, announce the posters. Well, not for a couple of years at least, since the great romantic tragedy was staged at Bristol as a story not of youth but old age, with the central couple being septuagenarians in a care home. However, in Ben Power’s two-handed version the lovers are middle-aged rather than geriatric, and most significantly, this is not the story we know. Here we see a couple happy in their long-established love, at warm ease with each other and able to be playful about their love without diminishing it at all. Then Juliet is stricken with a degenerative disease: we first see her hands’ grip fail, then she requires a walking-stick and then a wheelchair. The two have an impassioned debate about her suicide; Romeo resists fiercely, unable to face the prospect of life without her, but in the end submits, only to drink off the last of the deadly vial himself following Juliet’s own death.

How can Shakespeare’s text be bent to tell such a tale? By giving it a detailed mash-up. Power rearranges and reassigns lines and speeches without hesitation. Juliet now gets the Queen Mab speech, and also the Nurse’s speech about the infant Juliet (here, the couple’s daughter) falling over; in fact, this speech is delivered twice, first as an enjoyed remembrance then, in the final stages of Juliet’s decline, as a gabbled compulsion to hang on to some of her past. Other Shakespearean texts are also grafted in: Romeo protests that that is not love which alters when it alteration finds, in the words of Sonnet 116. But this is not a modish deconstruction; rather, the precision and thoughtfulness of the rearrangement recall that now-forgotten approach to literary criticism, close reading.

Helena Kaut-Howson’s production (which in fact premièred in the RSC’s Newcastle season a few months before that Bristol adaptation, but has only now come to Stratford) is blessed with a couple of consummate performers. Kathryn Hunter’s appropriateness may almost be taken as read, as she moves at first like an amorous rod puppet then seems almost to waste before our eyes. And I have long been a cheerleader for Richard McCabe, whose Romeo is bluff yet gentle, joyous when living in love and distressed at having to face an end to it.
     
Written for the Financial Times.