Garrick Theatre
You have to wonder about Kenneth Branagh's choice of plays for his year-long season. After resurrecting and starring in a tedious farce that should have been left for dead, his penultimate offering is one of the least rewarding Shakespeare plays in the canon.
The good news is that Richard Madden's Romeo and Lily James's Juliet convince as young obsessives who fancy the hell out of each other, even if Madden reprises perhaps too much of the dashing Prince he played opposite James's Cinderella in Branagh's film version of the fairy tale. His bearing is more officer-class than testosterone teen. James, though, is spot on, suggesting not only that there is a wanton passion beneath her demure, lily-white wardrobe but, as she swigs a bottle of plonk during the balcony scene, something mischievous, too.
Where Branagh and Rob Ashford's stylish, 1950s-set production goes awry, however, is with Meera Syal's Nurse who doubtless is aiming for Italian matriarch but ends up with Jewish mother. Even more problematic is that her instinct to go for laughs is often deployed at exactly the wrong moment, draining the play of the pathos on which it depends. However, Derek Jacobi as an ageing swashbuckler is a master-stroke of casting. Thing is, once his Mercutio is dead, he takes much of this handsome production's pace, urgency and tension with him.