Romeo & Juliet (Bell Shakespeare) ★★★½

Written by William Shakespeare. Bell Shakespeare. Sydney Opera House. 19 Nov – 7 Dec, 2025.

“Two households, both alike in…” — yeah, yeah, yeah, you know all this already, right? Romeo and Juliet are back to “love fast and die young” one more time. Those crazy kids and their poisons…

Bell Shakespeare have brought back their acclaimed, stripped-back staging from 2023 for another run after an extensive national tour. It caps off an interesting 2025 season, which saw the company take on some of the canon’s lesser-produced works, like Coriolanus. So it makes sense to wrap things up with one of the stone-cold, crowd-pleasing classics.

Artistic Director Peter Evans’ vision keeps the staging minimal, with a pair of basic risers, some rugs, and black-on-black costumes. Without the bells and whistles of modern theatremaking, it brings the focus back to the text and the performances—my two favourite things.

I’ve seen a few major productions of Romeo & Juliet over the last few years—from the very contemporary, OTT Broadway version with Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, to London’s Almeida Theatre production by hit director Rebecca Frecknall. Both approached the text in completely different ways. In comparison, Evans’ production feels refreshingly honest, with a simple clarity.

Sydney marks the end of a long tour, which sees the cast well and truly settled into their roles, or ‘rolls’ in the case of Ryan Hodson’s Romeo, who spends a fair amount of Act I sliding and crawling around the stage.

Easy standouts are Merridy Eastman’s Nurse (always a gift of a role for a performer) and Michael Wahr’s emotionally open Capulet—a role often reduced to mere power and rage, but here offering a more nuanced representation.

At the play’s heart are the two leads, both performers who have recently impressed with parts at the Old Fitz.

Hodson (who stood out in Posh) has a scruffy appeal that transforms into boyish glee in his Romeo, bringing out the character’s youthful, brash goofiness.

Madeline Li (who caught my eye in Dear Elena Sergeevna) gives us a strong and wilful Juliet. There is no attempt to present her as a fourteen-year-old, which neatly sidesteps any potential issues. She is a modern young woman who runs rings around the adults in her life.

Together, their romance feels like a meeting of equals.

It’s also nice to see some proper, old-school stage fighting. When done poorly, these sword fights feel slow and obviously safe. Here, Tom Royce-Hampton’s fight direction has a muscular energy and, while the choreography is still evident, it feels like the performers are putting some real heft into their swings.

The performance I caught was followed by an audience Q&A, and this is one of the areas where Bell Shakespeare truly excels. The cast were immaculate ambassadors for both the company and theatre as a whole, enthusiastically encouraging questions from kids in the audience as well as the older patrons.

Peter Evans resists the urge to impose an unnecessary concept on top of Shakespeare’s well-worn classic, and the result is a strong presentation of the text—one of Shakespeare’s most poetic, romantic, and heartbreaking stories. Sometimes you just need to strip away the distractions and let the words fill the space, which this production does so well.