Romeo and Julie

by Gary Owen 

Directed by Rachel O’Riordan

National Theatre, London

11th March 2023

The title of Gary Owen’s new play signals that we will be watching an updating of Shakespeare’s tale of thwarted teenage love, and anyone familiar with his last play, Iphigenia in Splott, will imagine that the contemporary setting will specifically be the working-class area of Cardiff. And on the surface we are right. Except that this is not a direct transposition of Shakespeare’s play or plot. It is a much more subtle interpretation of young love, parental responsibilities, personal ambition and social mobility in our own time.

Romeo is Romy, an eighteen-year-old teenage dad, who has found himself responsible for the care of a very young baby following a one-night stand with a girl who then wanted to give her baby up for adoption. The odds are stacked against Romy. He lives with his alcoholic mother, with very little money and even less clue about how to look after a baby. But Romy cannot deny the instinctive pull to protect his new born child, despite his mother urging him to give it up to foster care. Anyone who has been through the early stages of parenthood will recognise Romy’s hapless, terrifying, numb experience, as well as his burgeoning aptitude and profound love for his child: “She needs me, and I’m hers until she doesn’t need me anymore”.

Romy meets Julie in a cafe at the local leisure centre. Although from the same working-class background, Julie is an able A-level student with a dream to study Physics at Cambridge university. Julie is touched by Romy’s commitment as a Dad, and falls for him despite the impracticality of his circumstances. For Julie’s parents Romy is an entanglement that threatens to distract her from her academic goal, a goal that they have made sacrifices to support her in. Although they try to prevent Julie from seeing Romy, it is ultimately not their objection that threatens to keep the lovers apart, but Julie’s academic aspirations which seem irreconcilable with her personal feelings, and which will take her away to a new social world not compatible with his. Julie finds herself in the age-old predicament of how to preserve personal relationships when you begin to move out of your social class. The lovers’ challenges become even more pointed and poignant as their relationship deepens, and Julie and Romy become a family of their own. Like so many, she must choose between family and career. It is an impossible choice, because Julie’s identity and happiness are fuelled by both the love she has with her family and the pride she has in her success. Likewise, Romy desperately wants to be with her, but does not want to stand in her way, and knows he cannot travel with her into her unfamiliar world.

Like the original namesake, the play is a love story, and the two Welsh actors who play the leads, Callum Scott-Howells and Rosie Sheehy, are magnetic. They are energetic, charming, funny and moving, as is the play. Director Rachel O’Riordan creates poetic rhythms in the staging, with fluent choreographed movement as scenes change on a largely bare stage. The sinuous choreography that enacts Romeo and Julie’s first love-making is elegantly effective. Gary Owen’s text snaps with humour and distilled wisdom. Julie seeks to solve the theory of everything in her Physics, a theory that can handle tiny things, like Quantum theory, as well as massive things, like relativity. It’s the big issues and small details of their lives that Romeo and Julie struggle to reconcile, as we all do. And as ever, we’re left hoping, but asking, does love conquer all?

Romeo and Julie continues at the National Theatre in London until 1st April, and then plays at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff from 13th to 29th April 2023.