Romeo and Juliet, Oxford Shakespeare Company, Wadham College Gardens

1:39pm Wednesday 5th August 2009

By Christopher Gray

From the cheerily upbeat version of Little Richard’s Rip It Up that begins the show to the hummable account of Eddie Cochrane’s posthumous No 1 Three Steps to Heaven that follows the curtain call, music plays a central role in the success of the Oxford Shakespeare Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet in the lovely setting of the walled garden at Wadham College.

With catchy arrangements by musical director Paul Kissaun, and accompanied by actors who double as instrumentalists, the songs supply an appropriate commentary to the story in this most affecting tale of doomed young love. Alex Tomkins’s Romeo, for instance, first spots Juliet (Sophie Franklin) at the Capulet ball to the strains of Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World and continues their courtship to the lovely Fly Me to the Moon. Not even a director as talented as Guy Retallack, however, could have supplied a more fitting conjunction between song and action – we could have done without it! – than the sudden shower that had us reaching for our umbrellas on Monday precisely as Buddy Holly’s Raining in My Heart began.

The music has a valuable use, too, in exactly giving us the period, 1959, to which Retallack shifts the action and, to a degree, its setting, our very own Oxford. One could quite picture the quiffed grease monkey Romeo in a Cowley coffee bar of the time as one of the chavvy boiler-suited Montague set, involved in the Town v. Gown clashes with the donnish upper-crust Capulets, led by the paterfamilias (Martin Christopher) in mortar board and gown.

Performances across the eight-strong cast are strong, with particularly fine work from Poppy Roe, as both a female Benvolio – it works very well – and a sexy Lady Capulet. I much enjoyed, too, Chris Jordan’s well-judged tragi-comic turn as Mercutio.

The stars of the evening, however, as they must always be, are the star-crossed lovers. Two splendid touches are Romeo’s “Let me stand here” of the balcony scene transformed into a lengthy and impressive handstand, and a deathbed scene as well-managed under Retallack as any I have seen. Here Juliet comes round from the drug given to her by Friar Laurence (Paul Kissaun) before Romeo has finally succumbed to his poison and the two share a passionate last embrace as life ebbs from him.