It is the conceit of David Bassuk, who directed this exercise, to set the tragedy in turn-of-the-century Ireland - complete with gosh-and-begorra brogues, an interfamily brawl with picks and shovels, and periodic interpolations of Irish folk music. To give the devil his due, the shift in period makes a certain amount of social and political sense. But the Irish diction, which Bassuk calls "a wonderful opportunity to share Shakespeare's play in a dialect closer to the way it sounded in his own time," is simply perverse.
Perhaps, as some suggest, Shakespearean English shares certain linguistic characteristics - vowel sounds and the like - with the Ould Sod of the present day. Still, there remains a world of rhythmic difference between the ceaseless river of 20th-century Irish lyricism and the rhetorical tropes of much of Romeo and Juliet, and it makes about as much sense to overlay Romeo with the speech patterns of contemporary Dublin as it would to move Hamlet to Vicksburg, Miss., and play it in a Southern drawl.
Worse, however, is Bassuk's determination to stage the production for nonstop laughs, with the characters perpetually kicking and groping each other and undercutting almost every serious moment with a cheap gag. Bassuk has appropriated the social context of Romeo and Juliet's story and moved it front and center, leaving the story itself to fight for attention like some annoying little subplot. The result may be closer in spirit to the New Vic - the company led by that unrepentant trasher of classics, Mickey O'Donoghue - than to the Old.
Given all this, it's probably little wonder that the performances range
