When my wife Anna and I decided in 1968 to return from England to Australia we’d each had a good four years with the Royal Shakespeare Company in both London and Stratford-upon-Avon. We’d bought a little house in Stratford, not far from the Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare was baptised and buried. Both our daughters had been born in Stratford, we’d made good friends there and acted in some inspiring productions (and some not so inspiring). But we had a hankering to come home. We were a bit sick of tramping between London and Stratford each season with the kids, the dog and the cat. And we wanted the girls to grow up with sunshine, the bush and the beach. London’s leaden skies became more oppressive with each succeeding winter.

I was also becoming a little jaded with the uncertainties of a freelance actor’s prospects and had aspirations to direct. I was now an Associate Artist of the RSC and was aware I could probably count on becoming a cog in the vast English theatre machine; or I could take my chances in Australia and perhaps do something more useful. I wrote to John Clark, the director of NIDA, who offered me the job of head of acting from the beginning of 1970. So before I returned to Sydney I spent six months teaching acting at my alma mater, the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and some months with Lincoln’s Theatre Royal, which was being run by my old Sydney Uni friends Philip Hedley and Richard Wherrett.

One of the first roles I played for them was Romeo, a part I delighted in for its rapturous language, action and untrammelled emotionalism—a great role for a young actor but a difficult one. It’s easy for Romeo to come across as passive and wussy, pushed around by Mercutio, Juliet, the Nurse and the Friar. You have to bring a positive energy to the part, even when you’re moping over Rosaline (that name again!), taking directives from Juliet or thrashing about in self-pity in the Friar’s cell. The role demands a youthful exuberance, naivety, openness and innocence. Yet by the last act Romeo has grown into a mature tragic figure, solemn and purposeful. Juliet undergoes a similar transformation. We first see her as a thirteen-year-old girl, lively and witty but still innocent of the world. By the end of the balcony scene she is decisive and pragmatic, and her development as a tragic heroine is clearly charted from one scene to the next. The greatest challenge for the director of the play lies in the casting of those two roles: to find actors who, first of all, have the right ‘chemistry’ to move and convince an audience and make that relationship incandescent, and second, come across as convincingly adolescent (she is thirteen, he is sixteen), yet can handle the high tragedy and demanding rhetoric of the second half of the play. This is particularly true for Juliet, with big set pieces like ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds’, then the scene in which she confronts the Friar, and, toughest of all, the scene where she swallows the potion. The two boys for whom Shakespeare wrote the roles must have been formidable actors.

I have now directed the play three times, and never to my satisfaction, despite enthusiastic audience responses. It may well be one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, but I’m convinced it’s also one of the hardest to direct—that and Macbeth. The first difficulty, as I said, is in the casting of the two lead roles. If you don’t get that right, you’re sunk. The first time I directed it, for Nimrod, I had Mel Gibson and Angela Punch McGregor in the leads. The next time, for Bell Shakespeare in 1993, I had Daniel Lapaine and Essie Davis, and my most recent production, again for Bell Shakespeare, featured Julian Garner and Chloe Armstrong. Essie and Daniel were the best matched in terms of that essential chemistry.

Another challenge for the director is finding the right balance between the romantic comedy and hi-jinks of the first half of the play and the crushing tragedy of the second half, following Tybalt’s death. This was Shakespeare’s first attempt at tragedy and he was still feeling his way. There is a great danger that the lively spirits of Mercutio will so endear him to the audience that they will be unwilling to let him go, which is why Shakespeare had to kill him off. But that’s putting it too crudely; when Mercutio dies there is indeed a gap in nature and tragedy rushes in to fill the gulf. A cloud seems to pass over the sun and this is Romeo’s cue to take the quantum leap from callow youth to doomed man of action. The director has to get the tone just right in both halves of the play, because without the joy, lyricism, bawdy fun and youthful exuberance, there will be no tragic pay-off.

Maintaining the tension of the balcony scene is another challenge. It’s one of the most beautiful scenes in all of Shakespeare—rhapsodic, funny, touching and so natural in its expression of teenage love. The challenge in staging it is that she is up on a balcony for the whole scene and he is down below—they never touch! Some productions duck the issue by having Romeo climb up to the balcony, but then all the tension is gone. The whole point of the scene is that they cannot touch and therefore have to express themselves through words only . . . If they could be together they’d use different words or, more likely, stop talking altogether.

This physical separation has a strong thematic base; Romeo and Juliet are always being torn apart and separated and this only intensifies their longing for what is an idealised relationship. Romantic love like that of Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde is based on the concept of forbidden fruit—wanting the one you can never have. Once you have him or her, the romance is gone; so the only logical consummation is in death—being together for all eternity. It is instructive that Romeo and Juliet, the most famous lovers in history, spend so little time together. They fall in love at first sight, and after only fourteen lines of poetry Juliet is snatched away by her nurse. The next time we see them is the balcony scene, where they are separated by distance and have no physical contact. They meet briefly the following day, but before they have time to embrace, the Friar hurries them off to the chapel.

They are totally separated by Romeo’s banishment following the death of Tybalt, but Shakespeare allows them one precious night together (which we do not see, for obvious reasons) and a brief, painful leave-taking the morning after. And that’s it . . . the next time they see each other Juliet is supposedly dead in her tomb. Romeo takes his farewell of her and swallows poison. She awakes from her drug-induced slumber and is allowed only a moment to mourn for him before she stabs herself. So the world’s favourite love story is built around one night of marital bliss—the rest is all pining and fantasising.

That’s a pretty good account of the nature of romantic love, but it has its practical side too. The roles were written for teenage boys, one of them dressed as a girl. There was doubtless a homoerotic frisson for some of the audience watching pretty boys play love scenes together; at least the Puritan preachers thought so and thundered in the pulpit against this ‘lewdness’. So the theatre could only go so far. This is partly why Shakespeare keeps his lovers apart so much of the time. But they kiss when they first meet, they kiss again when parting after their night of love, and they kiss and embrace each other’s dead bodies: enough to get the preachers steamed up!

The logic of the story doesn’t bear too much scrutiny: the love at first sight, next day’s marriage, the efficacy of the Friar’s potion, his letter failing to reach Romeo—you have to take all of these with a rather large pinch of salt. So what makes it work so well? For a start, the irresistible poetry—language so energetic, imaginative and emotionally charged that it sweeps all before it and defies scepticism. And its lyrical extravagance is cunningly balanced by an earthy, bawdy prosaic presence in the characters of Mercutio, Peter and the Nurse, so that the play keeps its feet on the ground while its fancy roves among the stars. Mercutio’s scepticism and carnality combined with the Nurse’s earthiness stave off any danger of the play becoming effete. Through the power of poetry Shakespeare created on an empty stage and in broad daylight the hot streets of Verona, a lavish masquerade with its music, busy servants and call for lights, a magical moonlit garden, the spooky backstreets of Mantua (note the careful scene painting of the sinister apothecary’s shop), and the cavernous sepulchre of the Capulets. The specificity of the locations help to give the play a strong sense of realism. This is reinforced by Shakespeare being very specific about time as well as place. The action takes place over four days, commencing just after nine o’clock in the morning (‘but new struck nine’) in mid-July (‘How long is it now to Lammas-tide [1 August]?’ ‘A fortnight and odd days’) 1596 (‘’Tis since the earthquake [of 1585] now eleven years’). The Prince commands Capulet and Montague to visit him that afternoon and the same night Romeo gatecrashes the Capulet ball, woos Juliet on her balcony and agrees to marry her at nine o’clock next morning. The sun is still rising when Romeo ambushes Friar Lawrence and cajoles him into performing the marriage ceremony that afternoon. It is midday (‘The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon’) when the Nurse finds Romeo to confirm the arrangements.

In the next scene Juliet complains that she sent the Nurse to find Romeo at nine o’clock and that she’s been gone over three hours. Then the Nurse returns. So it is still day two when Romeo and Juliet meet at the Friar’s cell and are married. On his way home from the ceremony (we are told it’s a hot afternoon) Romeo runs into Tybalt and his gang. Mercutio and Tybalt are both killed, Romeo hides in the Friar’s cell and is banished by the Prince. Meanwhile Juliet is praying for evening to hurry on so that she and Romeo may meet, when the Nurse enters to tell her of Romeo’s fate. At night Romeo is smuggled into her chamber and they spend their one and only night together . . . On day three Romeo flees to Mantua and Juliet is told she must marry Count Paris. She runs to the Friar, who gives her the sleeping potion. Her father has brought the wedding forward to the next day so she drinks the potion that night. On the morning of day four the ‘dead’ Juliet is discovered and conveyed to the Capulets’ tomb. Romeo’s servant Balthazar witnesses the funeral and hurries to Mantua to give Romeo the bad news. Meanwhile Friar Lawrence’s letter goes astray. Romeo hastens back to Verona, breaks into the tomb, slays Paris and kills himself. Juliet wakes, refuses to leave Romeo and stabs herself just as dawn is breaking on day five. (‘A glooming peace this morning with it brings.’)

If you try to pace the action hour by hour, time hurtles by at an almost impossible pace. But a theatre audience doesn’t make that sort of calculation. By pushing the action forward at such a rate and constantly reminding us of the time, Shakespeare ratchets up the tension and stresses the impetuosity of all the protagonists. If only Friar Lawrence had had time to play the peacemaker and negotiate a marriage, if only Capulet had not rushed the wedding to Paris—if only anybody had stopped to think, then tragedy might have been averted. But as we are reminded over and over, this is a rash, hot-blooded society where people fall in love and fight to the death on impulse. This is a play about youthful passion:

It is too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden,

Too like the lightning which doth cease to be,

Ere one can say, it lightens.

Another thing that makes the play work is its universality. Audiences have always embraced young lovers, whether tragic or comic. We warm to their idealism and innocence, their prospects for the future. And in this case we have the pathos of young love thwarted by senseless violence. The children pay the price of their parents’ stupidity and stubbornness. You can locate the play wherever there is prejudice, bigotry, religious or ethnic conflict: on New York’s West Side, in Belfast, in Gaza or Bosnia—the model is always contemporary and relevant. And young audiences have always responded to Shakespeare’s depiction of the generation gap—teenagers misunderstood and driven to suicide by bullying parents who have forgotten what love is.

Shakespeare was twenty-nine when he wrote Romeo and Juliet, basing his play on a long narrative poem by Arthur Brooke, who found his source in Bandello, who in turn based his novella on still earlier Italian versions of the story. Brooke’s narrative takes nine months to unfold as opposed to Shakespeare’s four days. It is couched as a moral tale condemning youthful lust and disobedience—the lovers pay the ultimate price for their sins. The characters of Mercutio and the Nurse are Shakespeare’s invention as is the remarkable psychological study of the Capulet family. Romeo and Juliet flout all the conventions of society and religion, yet we sympathise with their reckless suicides.

Gary O’Connor comments that the young lovers never get to know one another. They are in love with the idea of love, with passion, with Eros, but not with reality: ‘Their love is based on a false reciprocity, which conceals a twin narcissism. They love within one another the reflection of themselves.’

All very possibly true, but theatre audiences don’t see it that way—we are too swept away by the spectacle of youth, beauty and innocence being needlessly wasted; of hopes for the future being dashed. The reconciliation of the families at the end of the play is a necessary and satisfying coda which gives the story both meaning and gravitas.

In Stratford in 1968 I played Paris in a production by the Greek director Karolos Koun, who was in England having fallen foul of the military junta in Athens. His production was quite dark and austere. The set consisted of two huge walls which, when moving, threatened to crush the characters (and, sometimes, unintentionally, the performers). We were all dressed in heavy woollen garments, and when somebody tentatively suggested that Verona was supposed to have a hot climate, Karolos responded, ‘No, it’s north.’ He was speaking from an Athenian perspective. It was interesting to note that to the Englishman, Shakespeare’s Verona was a hot place. To a Greek it was cold. It made a difference in the storytelling. Ian Holm was a doomed but plucky Romeo—his death wish seemed apparent from the start. Estelle Kohler played Juliet and Norman Rodway Mercutio. In her performance as the Nurse, Elizabeth Spriggs reminded me what a quintessentially English character she is in the midst of this supposedly Italian play. She is a marvellous creation, a perfect depiction of a Stratford gossip—vulgar, warm-hearted, foolish and devoted to Juliet, too easily caught up in her rash schemes. Her treachery in suggesting Juliet forget Romeo and marry Paris is as shocking as it is realistic. She is lacking not empathy but imagination, and is a simple workaday soul caught up in events too big for her capacities. Her vanity and vulgarity are beautifully captured when, at the ball, Romeo enquires as to the identity of Juliet. The Nurse proudly replies:

Marry, bachelor,

Her mother is the lady of the house,

And a good lady, and a wise and virtuous,

I nurs’d her daughter that you talk’d withal;

I tell you, he that can lay hold of her

Shall have the chinks.

The Friar, too, gets caught up in the youngsters’ heady affair. One can argue that he should have followed a more prudent course, but how do you stand up against the force of young love? There is something of the white magician about Friar Lawrence, reminiscent of Prospero or Pericles’ Cerimon. He is a naturalist and herbalist, but he knows his poisons. In his benevolent figure we see shadows of the old anti-Catholic propaganda which depicted monks and friars as meddling sinister characters, adept in poisons and treachery.

The spin-offs and transformations of Romeo and Juliet are too many to calculate—in movies, pop songs, opera, ballet and musicals. West Side Story is probably the most significant of the modern makeovers and is a considerable work in its own right—just one more example of Shakespeare’s ever-expanding universe.