“Romeo & Juliet”, Bard in the Botanics, Glasgow

28 July 2025
Mark Brown in Glasgow

Bard in the Botanics (the BiB) – for those who have not yet had the good fortune to encounter it – is the four-show mini festival of Shakespeare and other classical authors which is staged annually in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens. Every summer the company – which is led by its excellent artistic director Gordon Barr – presents four plays, two of which are played on an outdoor stage, with the other pair being performed in the splendid Kibble Palace Victorian glasshouse.

Lola Aluko and Sam Stopford.
Photo credit: Eoin Carey.

Next year BiB celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. The company will mark the occasion in the spring of 2026 with a Scottish national tour of its award-winning production of Euripides’s Medea which boasts a fine adaptation by Kathy McKean and an unforgettable lead performance by Nicole Cooper.

For now, however, the second of this season’s outdoor offerings is Romeo & Juliet directed by Barr himself. Such is our familiarity with much of Shakespeare’s work that it is now commonplace for the dramas to be played in modern dress.

The resetting in terms of time and place is no more surprising these days than Donald Trump making a policy announcement via social media. For example, film buffs will remember that, back in 1996, Baz Luhrmann’s screen version (which starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes) relocated the drama to a modern United States that was awash with firearms.

Barr’s new staging is in a similar vein. It is performed on designer Heather Grace Currie’s purposely unlovely urban set which consists largely of the paraphernalia of a contemporary building site.

Sam Stopford, Benjamin Keachie and Bailey Newsome.
Photo credit: Eoin Carey.

Floral tributes attached to a metal fence that has been cordoned off with police tape suggest a young life that has been violently cut short. When we meet the warring Montagues and Capulets it is in the context – which is currently giving great cause for concern in the UK – of young people (especially young men) carrying knives.

Although originally set among the Veronese aristocracy, the play is robust enough to carry Barr’s concept, complete with the urban youth choices in sports apparel, and their over indulgence in vodka and cider. The audience’s willingness to buy into the director’s relocation is enhanced by his casting of the superb Sam Stopford (fresh from an impressive performance as Mephistopheles in BiB’s staging of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus) as Romeo and the accomplished Lola Aluko as Juliet.

Stopford is possibly a tad too old to play Romeo, but – in his sweatshirt and gold chain – is captivating. When he eulogises Juliet, he beams with an infectious delight. The, by turns, besotted and anguished Aluko also convinces utterly, even when playing the famous balcony scene on an ugly piece of scaffolding.

The leads restore the romance of the play to even the most jaded theatre-goer. However, the supporting cast (including actors who are too young for such roles as Friar Laurence and Lord Capulet) is less consistent.

This is not, then, the strongest production to be staged by this impressive mini festival, but it is a more-than-passable evening’s outdoor Shakespeare.