The Two Gentlemen of Verona, RSC, Stratford review - not quite the intended gateway drug to Shakespeare

I have two guilty secrets about the theatre – okay, two I’m prepared to own up to right here, right now. I quite enjoy some jukebox musicals and I often prefer schools-oriented, pared back, slightly simplified Shakespeare to the full-scale Folio versions. There – I’ve outed myself!

So when I read that Joanna Bowman’s production of the rarely staged The Two Gentlemen of Verona was "a new 80-minute edit that’s the perfect introduction to Shakespeare for families" staged in The Other Place, where the history and iconography of Stratford Upon Avon hangs less heavy in the air, I was intrigued. 

My heart sank a little, eyeing the microphone on its stand in the middle of the small stage in the round – surely the most clichéd sight to see at a theatre in 2025? Mercifully, despite a fair chunk of tunes in the show and neon lights overhead (Milan turned into a Magaluf nightclub) it was largely left unused in a production that was modern dress and modern sensibility – crucially so near the end – but otherwise traditional if truncated. And yes, for longstanding fans of the play, we did have a dog in the cast, Crab played by Lossi the lurcher who, in an outrageous moment of showstealing improv, revealed that she must be a bitch to work with…We open on two fast friends, Valentine and Proteus, the former sent off to metropolitan Milan, where he instantly falls for Sylvia, who, happily, falls for him too. Proteus stays in Verona in the arms of Julia, but he’s soon packed off to the big city too, where he also falls for sexy Sylvia. Now on manoeuvres, Proteus betrays his friend, who is exiled, easily sees off Sylvia’s father’s choice for a husband, the milquetoast Thurio, and seeks to claim his ill-gotten prize. But Sylvia sees through him and, when Julia turns up disguised as a page boy, the shit hits the fan – in fact the shit (Proteus) hits Sylvia – and the long-coming showdown leads to a somewhat uneasy resolution.

And all in 90 minutes (pushed up from the advertised 80) of frenetic action, which would be fine were the cast not a little too quick and too shrieky with some of the line readings. Any kids in the audience and, it should be said, a fair few of the adults, would be left wondering why ol’ Shakey is always described as a poet, the blank verse rather buried in the haste to pack in all that plot and music.

I was reminded a little of Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, in which Lionel Bart explores much of what was to bloom to miraculous effect in Oliver! In Two Gentlemen, you can see Shakespeare trying out characters, plot devices and techniques that he revisits later in his career with much greater subtlety and impact. The exploration of the tension between male friendship and male-female love is not handled with great sophistication, but the fact that it is included at all is fascinating. As is the case with Fings, it’s not a bad show in and of itself, but you can’t help but think of what was still a few years over the horizon for the young Will, carousing round Elizabethan London with Kit Marlowe and entourage.

A play like this – fools in love – needs a young cast, and it gets one. Lance West, as Proteus, just about manages the pivot from good lad in love with a boxing, beautiful Julia (Aisha Goodman, pictured above) to infatuation with the somewhat superficial, but determined, Sylvia (Siân Stephens). I thought it very unlikely that any lad would dump the former for the latter, but that just underlines Proteus’s er… protean nature. Jonny Khan has a lot of fun with Valentine, whose innate decency is not undermined, in this version, by Shakespeare’s notorious line about yielding up Sylvia to Proteus like a Pokemon card in a swapsie. You got your Julia man, why the tears?

Much of the humour comes through the clever, cynical servants, Stu McLoughlin wringing every last laugh out of Launce, who knows he’s working for an idiot boy in Proteus, but meets that challenge with a world-weary air and a dog of complementary nature. Tom Babbage, Valentine’s servant in an AC Milan shirt, gets his quips in as Speed and doubles effectively as Thurio in the part that would, in a Carry On, have gone to Charles Hawtrey.

Not all the edits work, the staging sometimes swamps the characters and, as an intro to Shakespeare for families, the 90 minutes is at the absolute edge of what might be expected of a younger teen, but it’s still a lot of fun. 

But that’s if you can shut your brain down from jabbing you with “He did that better in Twelfth Night” and “That was better in Much Ado About Nothing”.  

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona at RSC, Stratford until 31 August
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk