THEATRE REVIEW

APRIL 2026 | Volume 262

 

U.K.-based Lost Dog dance company’s Juliet & Romeo is about a couple trying to fix their marital issues by digging into the memories they had as young lovers. While their past is based on Shakespeare’s couple, the characters themselves are not. Juliet (Emily Terndrup) is a chatty, over enthusiastic woman and Romeo (John Kendall) is supposed to represent emotional unavailability often associated with men in long-term relationships. Directed by Ben Duke, the play, instead of using modern relationship problems to drive the plot, gets stuck in these ideas of emotional availability and accountability, leaving only some sporadic dance sequences to get to the finish line.

The actors break the fourth wall the moment they enter the stage. It isn't even clear if the play has begun. They acknowledge the audience’s presence outright, stating that enacting their memories in front of a crowd might help sort through their relationship problems. After having tried psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, massage therapy, they hope this will be the fix. It isn’t clear how it would help, and even if this is some sort of exposure therapy, the reasoning becomes less logical as the plot gets diluted with dance. The fact that the couple have a daughter also does little for the plot.

The minimal set is an indoor space used as the couple’s house. For a play interested in experimentation, a majority of jokes were situated in how couples find each other intolerable after twenty years of marriage. While the older folks in the audience seemed to find plenty to laugh about, none of the jokes were new. The sparse references to Shakespeare’s work – like the rich man Juliet wished she had married and a prolonged re-enactment of drinking the poison – added a bit of creative vitality to the scenes but those references weren’t consistent enough. It should be said that dance and comedy are very difficult to pair but the play’s attempts to merge the two result in absurdity. And not the good kind.

The dance sequences were well-choreographed and something to look forward to. The dynamic lighting design by Jackie Shemesh made scenes stand apart despite the static setup. The dancing was the most novel and unpredictable part of the show. It was hard to tell if the athletic moves – often accompanied by memorable tracks from The Beatles and Frank Sinatra – were supposed to be humorous.

Breaking the fourth wall is a mighty task but the actors excel in that respect. Unlike in Shakespeare’s play, Juliet’s energy carries this show while Romeo is supposed to be an uninterested husband. The show tries to look deeper into this common dynamic of modern-day couples but just ends up using Juliet’s enthusiasm for laughs. I understand the questions of modern romance that the writers hope to deal with. However, the questions are too implicit in the play for them to come to the fore. The dialogues are predictable and unhelpful in insinuating that any deeper philosophy might be at play.

Audiences for this loosely structured play, which is clearly interested in experimentation first and foremost, can expect to find themselves laughing in the face of absurdity.

- Review by Aadya Arora

 

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