STAGE REVIEW: Romeo and Juliet - at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, September 22, 2018.

FORGET ancient Verona and its beauty, forget too the airs and graces of titled families, this is Shakespeare’s finest love story with a considerable edge.

It’s aggression full on for the first half with Erica Whyman’s production transporting our star-crossed lovers 400 years forward to possibly a London suburb where knife crime is the norm that is now regularly reported in newspapers and on radio and television.

It’s loud, brash and inhabited by a young loutish element with behavioural problems and a scant lack of respect for others. And there’s skin-tight jeans, t-shirts and trainers and roles where males have morphed into females. Sound familiar?

The second half is much softer but by then the damage had been done.

Whyman’s aim is to get on down with the kids, to make the Bard’s work more appealing to a younger audience. An admirable concept to a degree but what about those in the audience - those more discerning and with a few extra years on the clock, who came along wanting to see the play they are more used to?

And what about overseas visitors too - brought up mainly on a diet of traditional performances who enjoy their Shakespeare as intended?

Entertainment is surely the transport away from the day to day ills that surround us, an opportunity to forget, all be it briefly, many of life’s problems. But this slaps you right across the face with the malaise of today.

The set is disappointingly stark to the nth degree! Is the RSC on a cost-cutting initiative? The only object on stage is what is best described as a large metal container cut away on two sides. Could it have been a cast off from the famous illusionist David Copperfield?

There was little magic about it as the interior took on several guises and the roof disappointingly served as Juliet's bedroom, the iconic balcony and the chapel where she and Romeo departed this world.

When the director began her preparations for what she calls ‘this beautiful play’ she claims she set out her stall in transposing it to a world as close to our own as possible - which meant a cast considerably diverse and representative of the UK’s complex differences.

However, inappropriate behaviour, flashing blades and completely unnecessary loud club music as the cast bounced to the beat created only a sense of bewilderment and there was, unfortunately, a sense of relief when one of the main protaganists was ‘bumped off’.

Not that beautiful!

But still there were some fine individual performances. Our lovers, played by Karen Fishwick and Bally Gill, hit the heights of romance and the depths of despair with their doomed romance and Ishia Bennison, a television regular in many hit series, was considerably entertaining as the caring but over-talkative Nurse.

Michael Hodgson impressed too as Capulet, Juliet’s don’t-mess-me-about dominating father, and there was a warming portrayal too from Andrew French as the helpful Friar Laurence.

“I hope that in every case I have respected the play’, says Whyman, in her programme notes, “its power dynamics, its expectations of difference and that we have found ways to illuminate these characters afresh”.

The RSC’s deputy artistic director has also introduced new women into the cast and she adds: “This is, after all, the challenge and pleasure of rediscovering such a well-known play for its next audiences”.

Some of us, she says, may miss the straightforward identification of these characters as either male or female.

“For some of you, they will seem less like yourselves. I would only ask that, in suspending your disbelief, you are able to imagine what it to see through an other’s eyes”.

I can understand what she is striving for, but it didn’t float my boat and I just hope we aren’t going to be heading too far along the PC trail that eventually leads to an area far removed from what the playwright intended.

It’s stood the test of time through 400 years - which means it must be special in its own right!