What image does Romeo and Juliet conjure for you? How high is your balcony? In Shakespeare’s play, vertical distance is a nod to the Petrarchan courtly love conventions that placed the lady on a pedestal. But, like a lot of conventions, Shakespeare calls up this one only to implode it. Instead of the male lover wooing his lady from below, Juliet speaks to herself, and in doing so reveals that she is prepared to give up her family, her world, to have Romeo: ‘Be but called my love and I’ll no longer be a Capulet.’

Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, which opened in Canberra this week, makes daring new sense of the forces dividing the lovers. Instead of utilising vertical space, the stage, comprising two platforms with a channel between them, allows isolation and connection to play out on the horizontal plane.

For most of the balcony scene, the lovers occupy separate islands – this is especially fitting when Juliet (Madeline Li) expresses her fears which Romeo (Ryan Hodson) sweeps away with love-speak. After their first farewell, however, Juliet creeps back, calling ‘Romeo’ into the dark. He returns for a less formal exchange, during which she joins him on the platform. Abashed by the new proximity, Juliet forgets why she called him back. Romeo, content for any excuse to be close to her, says, ‘Let me stand here while thou remember it.’ In this moment the platform becomes an island of the eternal present.

It has often been remarked that Romeo and Juliet is a play about haste, but Pete Evans’s direction has created varied speed settings to reflect the subjective experience of time. It is usually the lovers who are accused of impatience. The Friar counsels Romeo: ‘Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.’ In this production the lovers linger. Just before interval, even as the Friar hurries the couple off to make their wedding vows, Juliet draws Romeo back for a tender kiss.

Another force for stalling is the Nurse, played with great humour and pathos by Merridy Eastman. In a rambling reminiscence, she reveals that Juliet and her daughter Susan were ‘of an age’. ‘Well, Susan is with God; / She was too good for me’, she says, brushing away her pain. Eastman’s moving performance reminds us that the cycle of loss was in motion long before the lovers’ story began.

Merridy Eastman as Nurse, Brittany Santariga as Mercutio, James Thomasson as Benvolio and Ryan Hodson as Romeo (courtesy of Bell Shakespeare)

We all know how the play ends. Even Shakespeare’s first audiences were informed from the outset that ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’. Yet the varied pace of this production keeps the surprises coming. There is a strange dissonance between the pace of the party implied by Capulet’s invitation to dance – to ‘foot it, ladies’ – and the stately, mesmeric masque which follows (choreography by Simone Sault, music by Max Lyandvert). With costume design by Anna Tregloan, characters wear black throughout most of the production, except on this occasion when they don silky coloured capes and masks reminiscent of the figures of commedia dell’arte.

But comedy evaporates with Mercutio’s death, which Brittany Santariga delivers with raw fury: ‘A plague on both your houses.’ Romeo’s rage then speeds up the tragic end; he fights and kills Tybalt (Tom Matthews). Banished from Verona, his world turns upside down. This shifting verticality produces an eerie reality when Romeo seeks comfort from Friar (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor) and the reflective surface of the platforms casts upside-down shadows onto the back wall of the stage.

The simple schema of the stage with its platforms and channels permits centres of action to unfold in different tempos. As Capulet hastens plans for Juliet’s marriage to Paris on one platform, Romeo creeps in softly to lie with Juliet on the other. Frantic preparations for the wedding take place around the platform where the unconscious Juliet lies. Upon discovery of her state, the Capulet household gathers around Juliet. We know that she is not dead, but this sculpturally downlit tableau forms an unsettling visual premonition of the tragedy to come (lighting by Benjamin Cisterne).

Overall, this production has much to recommend it. The words are spoken with clarity and meaning, even if with little nuance at times. The costume and lighting design largely support the storytelling, although the ritually arranged red carpets and shiny black screen seem somewhat redundant. The appearance of swords, which are used exclusively in the sword fights, is inconsistent. In Shakespeare’s play, the smallest provocation escalates because the Montagues and Capulets bear arms, but in this production they often do not have the arms to bear. The rehearsal-room solution of having swords and rapiers sitting in a bucket upstage strains credulity. However, all actors show frightening facility in simulated swordplay – a credit to them and to Fight Director Thomas Royce-Hampton.

In a world where the cheap, the fake, and the fleeting vie for our attention, Evans’s Romeo & Juliet reminds us of the time and love required to craft live art, and of the art of living in real time.

Romeo & Juliet (Bell Shakespeare) continues at Canberra Theatre Centre until 7 September 2025. Performance attended: August 31.