By Galen Simmons

Sometimes I forget the story of Romeo and Juliet is about two teenagers who, upon meeting each other briefly for the first time, fall madly in love and then make increasingly bad decisions until both of them die.

That may be a little oversimplified and perhaps does not do justice to the Bard’s most well-known work, but when I remind myself these are teenagers throwing their lives and those of everyone around them into chaos for nothing more than the chance to be together, suddenly the story makes a lot more sense.

In the Stratford Festival’s 2024 production of Romeo and Juliet, I didn’t need to remind myself of the main protagonists’ youthful ignorance. Both Romeo (Jonathan Mason) and Juliet (Vanessa Sears) act in such reckless disregard of their respective families and the tensions between them, I found no other reason for their actions other than they were driven by those often uncontrollable and unpredictable teenage hormones.

Teenagers lack the maturity to fully understand or control their emotions, something I recognized in both Mason and Sears’ performances, particularly when they are on stage together but also in how they speak almost obsessively about each other with their friends and family.

Those teenage hormones are also on full display in the actions of Romeo’s friends – Mercutio (Andrew Iles) and Benvolio (Steven Hao) – as they venture into enemy territory with Romeo’s servant, Balthasar (John Kirkpatrick), crashing the party at which Romeo first sees Juliet, and taunting and engaging in street brawls with the likes of Juliet’s hot-headed cousin, Tybalt (Emilio Vieira), and her family’s servants, Sampson (Tarique Lewis) and Gregory (Howard Dai).

While these actions result in one of the best-choreographed duels I’ve seen on the Festival stage, they also result in the deaths of both Mercutio and Tybalt, further entrenching the feud between the Capulets and Montagues that keeps Romeo and Juliet apart, which, in turn, fuels both of the young lovers’ series of bad decisions that follow. And we all know how that turns out.

The adult characters in this play, specifically Scott Wentworth’s Friar Lawrence and Glynis Ranney’s Nurse – both of whom are wonderfully portrayed – may have good intentions in trying to help the young lovers, but instead only enable Romeo and Juliet in making those fatally bad decisions. Others, like Juliet’s parents, Lady Capulet (Jessica B. Hill) and Capulet (Graham Abbey), only bolster their daughter’s rebellious intent by trying to force her to marry a man, Paris (Austin Eckert), she does not love. Nothing makes a teenager want to do something more than telling them they aren’t allowed.

This notion of teenage hormones leading to bad decision after bad decision is only intensified, at least in my mind, by the use of onstage percussionists. The driving beat not only pushes the plot forward and adds intensity to some of the more dramatic and action-packed scenes, it also left me with the impression of a ticking clock counting down to the moment everyone knows is coming – the tragic deaths of Romeo and Juliet.

While Romeo and Juliet is not my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays and I sometimes feel the play is a little over-favoured by some theatre companies, this production leans into the teenage stupidity of it all, and I think I got more out of it for that reason.