Romeo and Juliet. The Globe Theatre.

Playing Shakespeare is Shakespeare’s Globe’s flagship partnership for secondary schools, offering up an action-packed, paired down 90-minute version of a key curriculum text especially adapted for 11 to 16 year-olds. Judging by the whoops and hollers of pleasure emanating from the many school groups in attendance, director Lucy Cuthbertson’s production of Romeo and Juliet most definitely hits the mark. There is a huge amount in this gloriously anarchic production for an older audience to relish too. This is the Bard’s first great tragedy painted in big, bold, brash strokes. Packed with humour, with a powerful anti-knife crime agenda at its core this is Romeo and Juliet for the Tik Tok generation.

Cuthbertson places Verona in a grungy, foreboding, modern-day, low-income neighbourhood lorded over by drug gangs and submerged in violence. Given that nearby Mantua is identified by a sign mocked-up in the London Underground’s roundel, one suspects set and costume designer Natalie Pryce may have parts of the capital in mind. Rough sleepers huddle around stoves for warmth. A menacing black-clad masked biker circles the streets, periodically interrupting his (very impressive) wheelies to swoop in and steal phones from unsuspecting passers-by. Drug-dealers sell lethal potions from ‘Mantua Eat’ food delivery bags. Garish graffiti covers every available space. Flowers, balloons, a teddy bear, and candles mark out impromptu shrines to victims of knife crime. Someone has written ‘lives not knives’ on an improvised sign near a photo of one of the recently dead.

The fights when they come, and they come often, are brutal affairs conducted with police batons and kitchen cleavers. Anticipate lashings of Kensington gore, police tape marking off crime scenes, and the appearance of forensic investigators to carry off the corpses. “Throw your mistemper’d weapons to the ground” says the enraged Prince cum Police Chief and you really wish they would. This being an inclusive production, when Mercutio (a deliciously camp show-stealing turn by Ashley Byam) entices Tybault (Liam King, Glaswegian angry) into that fateful bust-up he does it with a long, lingering kiss on the lips, much to the delight of the teen audience.

Though a sense of looming violence is never far away, there is hope here too. Benevolent Friar Laurence (Mariéme Diouf) runs a food bank from the local church and encourages the youth to occupy their time on a city farm. The Nurse (a gloriously gobby Welsh-accented Miriam Grace Edwards), who is partial to a Burger King takeaway and a bottle or two of blue WKD, multi-tasks as both confidante to Juliet and uniformed NHS paramedic. Juliet’s party-loving mum Lady Capulet (Sharon Ballard in low-cut leopard skin boob tube and full-on Essex diva mode) does not really get her daughter and lives in fear of her domestic abuser husband Capulet (Gethin Alderman), but one senses she has a decent soul.

Hayden Mampasi plays Romeo as a cheeky, bubbly, naïve, track suited chancer who seems to spend much of his time up with the fairies. Hair shaved like a lion’s mane he punches the air and high-fives his mates when he meets the girl of his dreams. But inside one senses a deep seated lack of confidence. Indeed, Romeo has to look winsomely to the audience for moral support before calling out to the balcony. He gulps and sniffles unstoppably when sent away to Mantua. Felixe Forde’s Juliet, part stroppy teen and part mature way beyond her years, is the serious one here. When the star-crossed lovers get to meet it is at a cleverly choreographed rave ball. The first kiss is more full-on snog than chaste peck on the cheek. Inevitably subtleties are lost with such big brush strokes of character, but there is so much fun here it really does not matter.

A highlight is a hallucinogenic physical theatre sequence as Juliet slips into post-potion slumber. The menacing biker reappears in a fluorescent pink tutu as the ensemble dance to drums and symbols around the prone form of the young lover. Paris (Simeon Desvignes, buff, smouldering, and clad in a silver suit) begins a full-monty style strip tease. It is nuts, but brilliant in its sheer inventiveness.

Cuthbertson wisely never dumbs down the central message she has for her young audience: violence breeds violence. The lovers, charming as they are, are trapped within a system of endemic aggression. In one of the piece’s most chilling moments, when that biker stops by Mercutio’s corpse it is not to offer aid but to take selfies. Break that system and you give youth a chance.

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Lucy Cuthbertson