Testing Alan Armstrong’s “Academic Review Kit”: A Review of Northern Broadsides’ Romeo and Juliet

St. Serendipity must be the patron saint of theatre reviewers. As I traveled back on the tube last night wondering how to sound positive about yet another indifferent production of Romeo and Juliet, I took out my newly received copy of Shakespeare Bulletin: essential reading matter for bored commuters everywhere. As if by magic, it fell open at Alan Armstrong’s wittily acerbic “Romeo and Juliet Academic Theatre Review Kit” (SB, 26.1 [2008], 109–24) in which he devises and lists, as a series of tick-boxes, the most conspicuous features of various productions so that the contemporary reviewer has only to proceed through the multiple choice of his Identikit template to produce a coherent review of the latest version. Armstrong’s case, though irreverent, is not without some assiduously gathered ammunition since, as he states, he collected and analyzed no fewer than “111 reviews of 73 productions of Romeo and Juliet, stretching back to 1987” (118). As the most frequently cited contributor (I certainly had no idea that I had reviewed the play that many times which makes me worry about how many productions I have sat through when not writing it up), I feel especially entitled to engage with and test out Armstrong’s thesis.

While in no way dismissive of what it is we do as theatre reviewers (and how could he be since he is one of our most prolific and experienced colleagues?), Armstrong’s Structuralist recipe of production features (reminiscent of Vladimir Propp’s The Morphology of the Folktale) reveals not only how conventionalized and unexciting academic theatre reviewing has become, subject as it is to the “reductive pressure of the traditional review format” (119) but, concomitantly, how conventionalized and unexciting productions of Romeo and Juliet have become. While Armstrong could have chosen any one of a number of commonly performed plays around which to build his theatre reviewer’s kit, his choice of Romeo is especially apt to illustrate the sheer tiredness of contemporary performance styles. As his checklist demonstrates, productions of this play over the last twenty years have produced little distinctive or noteworthy. In fact there is an unspoken consensus among seasoned theatre-goers that, though not as straightforwardly tedious as As You Like It, this is the Shakespeare play that is most difficult to bring off.

A production by Northern Broadsides might be an especially testing environment to which to subject Armstrong’s review kit given that, as Christian M. Billing has recently argued, Rutter’s directorial style is uncompromisingly designed to confront and expose the complacency of the established (and, not incidentally, heavily state-subsidized) and culturally elitist theatres such as the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre (“Barrie Rutter”, in The Routledge Companion to Director’s Shakespeare, 389–406). Rutter’s “level-headed clarity [and] uncluttered performance style” (405) ought to provide a stark departure from the numbingly normative features of customary productions that Armstrong identifies as prompting so many uninspiring reviews of the play. Broadsides pride themselves on minimal staging, rough and ready properties and costume, and the kind of transferable design necessitated by touring (this production is visiting a dozen venues across England). Most conspicuously, Rutter’s insistence on speaking Shakespeare’s language

Benedict Fogerty as Romeo and Sarah Ridgeway as Juliet in Northern Broadsides’ 2008 production of Romeo & Juliet, directed by Barrie Rutter. Photo by Nobby Clark.

The “Masked Ball” scene in Northern...