Romeo a Juliet review – star-crossed lovers divided by language

‘Speakest thou from the heart?” Or rather: “Ai dyna iaith dy galon?” In Theatr Cymru’s bilingual tragedy, alternating between Shakespeare’s English and JT Jones’s Welsh translation, the uttering of any word acquires a particular salience. Steffan Donnelly’s finely detailed production casts the Montagues as Welsh speakers and the Capulets as not. It’s a neat dramatic conceit that in its most successful moments finds striking new fissions within the familiar stage traffic.

Isabella Colby Browne’s Juliet is often playfully petulant, complemented by Steffan Cennydd’s easy, prepossessing swagger as Romeo. Eiry Thomas’s commanding Ffrier Lorens makes an impression and Llinor ap Gwynedd’s excellent turn as the Nyrs, mostly English-speaking but with a broad Welsh accent, is imbued with a new dramatic complexity within the bilingual conceit. After Capulet strikes the Nyrs, calling her a “mumbling fool” for having uttered a Welsh sentence, all kinds of violent prejudices are bracingly exposed in a single, pithy sentence.

Similarly, in the seclusion of her cell, the Ffrier and Romeo privately confer in Welsh, but respond to intrusive knocks from the outside world in English. All of this is evocatively staged on Elin Steele’s set of staircases and alcoves, which uses water to great effect – cleansing while also portending catastrophe.

While the ambitious concept opens the possibility of exploring linguistic identity, intertwined with familial and class allegiances, its impact feels nebulous when the deployment of different languages is not underpinned by dramatic logic and instead seems arbitrary. The experience can feel discordant and the scenes performed mostly in one language or the other (and one particularly elegiac sequence with no words at all) are more compelling.

Staged in association with the Globe, the production’s tour will end on the bank of the Thames where perhaps such conceptual dissonances will be less of an issue to audiences unfamiliar with the Welsh language. As a production, it clearly speaks from the calon. But as well as that heart, you yearn for more logic.

• At Sherman theatre, Cardiff, until 3 October. Then touring Wales and at Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, 5-8 November.