Show fails to match director’s claims — that’s the tragedy

ROMEO AND JULIET, Lowry Lyric, Salford

I WAIT in vain for a director who can not only talk up his next show, but also deliver what he claims.

For this, for instance, famed director Neil Bartlett emphasises post-war Italy, Veronese macho, family vendetta and a play that is actually about two very alike — rather than very different — families.

At the play’s heart, he suggests, are youngsters whose destinies are mapped out by their families long before they are born.

But then he gives us an uncut version of the play, coming in at more than 31/4 hours, sets it on a bare stage (with a brass bed for the balcony), makes the Verona summer sunshine bounce off a single black brick wall that dominates everything, and makes the underlit evening look like some gloomy dirge.

Then he offers a reading that is not all that different, when you get down to it, than anyone else’s.

The biggest cheat is this idea of an Italian post-war setting. Putting your young men in sharp suits and having them carry switchblades, and your women in A-Line dresses, does not a post-war setting make.

The casting of Eva Magyar as Lady Capulet is a little strange,since her heavy Hungarian accent often makes her words unintelligible.

The nurse of Julie Legrand and the Friar Lawrence of James Clyde are both assured performances, perhaps the most satisfying of the evening — hers tough and direct, his confident, but still a man on the edge of his ideas about right and wrong.

The two lovers are a slightly weedy pair: David Dawson looks like he is auditioning for “Brideshead Revisited” rather than playing Romeo, and only occasionally matches his level of teenage angst to his character’s dilemmas. Anneika Rose as Juliet has a sweet look but emotions far more mature than her character’s age.