Review of the Week: Romeo and Juliet / Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Romeo and Juliet is at the Harold Pinter theatre, London SW1, until 20 June;

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is at the National Theatre, London SE1, until 6 June

Romeo and Juliet are very young and they move very fast. As the recurring digital clock in Robert Icke’s production makes clear, they meet on Sunday night and they’re dead by sunrise on Thursday. Leaning into youth and velocity is the only way to make sense of a tragedy which, more than most of Shakespeare’s, feels so avoidable. When the play opens, nothing bad has happened yet. With better luck, it could be a romantic comedy.

Noah Jupe, 21, and Sadie Sink, 23, make for convincing teenagers, conveying both instant infatuation and terrible judgement. This production, though, might more accurately be called Juliet and Romeo because Sink is its dramatic centre – literally so, because she spends most of the play on a king-sized bed in the middle of the stage. Best known for Stranger Things but Tony-nominated on Broadway, her Juliet is a mesmerising tornado of hormones: neurotic, goofy, petulant, horny. Her volatile relationship with her parents (Clark Gregg and Eden Epstein) is painfully relatable. Just as Andrew Scott blew the dust off the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Icke’s Hamlet, Sink makes the famous balcony scene feel frantically improvised.

Family rivalry may be the framework but this is really a tragedy of immaturity. While it’s not a new idea to present the feud between Montagues and Capulets as gang warfare (hello, West Side Story), Icke underscores the pointlessness of violence. With his silly accents and chronic trouser-dropping, Kasper Hilton-Hille’s Mercutio is an insufferable smartarse who effectively trolls Tybalt into stabbing him. His clash with Clare Perkins’s Nurse, reinvented as a tough, chortling cockney matriarch, is a treat. She’s too old for his bullshit. As the lovers grow more frazzled and jumpy, you wonder if they, too, would make better decisions if they weren’t up all night or haunted by bad dreams and apparitions. Jon Clark’s lighting tracks the text’s obsession with day and night, sleep and light.

In my book, there’s no director more audacious or intelligent than Icke when it comes to rebooting the classics but this is a tad less sure-footed than his Hamlet or Oedipus: the heavy needle-drops (Tori Amos, Adrianne Lenker) threaten to overwhelm key scenes. Perhaps that’s because he came up with the key innovations, for a 2012 staging, when he was just 25. His biggest swing is the decision to challenge tragic inevitability by showing us alternative versions of key scenes, signalled by a white flash, in which one gesture makes all the difference: Romeo and Juliet never meet, Romeo receives the crucial letter explaining that Juliet is not dead but briefly comatose, Juliet wakes up just in time. There are actual sliding doors in Hildegard Bechtler’s stark, imposing set. These glimpses of a better timeline escalate in the torch-lit denouement when Juliet has a premonition of the long lives the couple might have lived. It’s melodramatic and sure to be divisive but it still almost made me cry. What dreadful luck. What a terrible waste.

There are more knives and fatally mishandled letters in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, but not so much love. If Romeo and Juliet thought Verona was rough, then the Paris of Louis XVI would eat them alive.

Marianne Elliott’s opulent production in the Lyttleton theatre pairs nicely with Gorky’s Summerfolk, running upstairs at the Olivier. Both examine a decaying elite on the verge of a revolution. In one, it’s the muddling Russian bourgeoisie; in another, a French aristocracy so jaded that only power and revenge can arouse it. Rosanna Vize’s erotic frescos, gliding L-shaped rooms and wall of mirrors (this is a society of narcissists and voyeurs) are palatial. Costume designer Natalie Roar’s gowns are ravishing. But the motivating forces of Parisian high society are viciously ugly. Christopher Hampton’s play, debuted in 1985 and memorably filmed as Dangerous Liaisons in 1988, resembles its protagonists: cold, precise and without mercy.

The story is of a game that destroys its players. Former lovers, now partners in crime, the regal Marquise de Merteuil (Lesley Manville) and the notorious rake Vicomte de Valmont (Aidan Turner) conspire to corrupt two young women: the unworldly 16-year-old Cécile de Volanges (Hannah van der Westhuysen) and the prim, earnest Madame de Tourvel (Monica Barbaro). “I thought betrayal was your favourite word,” Valmont teases. “No,” says Merteuil. “Cruelty.”

Based on the epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Hampton’s play focuses on the power of words to make or break lives, but Elliott adds a pulsing physicality with dance sequences strikingly choreographed by Tom Jackson Greaves. When classical music is playing, we’re in the real world of society balls; when the sinister electronic beat kicks in, we’re in an erotic hallucination, giving Tourvel in particular a feverish inner life. In one brilliant illustration of a generational power shift, Van der Westhuysen slowly disrobes while Manville cloaks herself in widow’s weeds. Keep your eye on the gowns.

Turner, famous for his Byronic good looks, gives Valmont a louche, overdone charm, comically bored by a lifetime of seductions, although when he falls on Cécile we’re in no doubt that we’re watching a grown man groom a teenager for sport. Manville, swathed in scarlet and sucking oysters, makes a pseudo-feminist case for sex and scheming as the only power she can wield in an empire of men. Their victims are sharply played, too, by relative newcomers. Van der Westhuysen embodies Cécile’s unnerving transition from virgin to vamp while Barbaro recalls her Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown: a woman of immense principle and dignity who succumbs to an unreliable man.

While the play’s first half is wickedly playful, the second draws blood when Valmont makes the fatal mistake of actually falling in love, robotically repeating his mantra: “It’s beyond my control.” The schemers’ final reversal of fortune is no less shocking for being so well-deserved. As Merteuil knows, the rules of the game are simple: “Win or die.”

The conclusion you might draw from this week’s two prestigious openings, then, is that love will kill you one way or another. Bring a date at your peril.

Romeo and Juliet

Les Liaisons Dangereuses