In the intimate confines of The Lounge at Chatswood Concourse, Come You Spirits unveils a Romeo & Juliet that breathes with immediacy and intimacy. Stripped to its core, this production distills Shakespeare’s sprawling tragedy into a concentrated elixir of love, fate, and defiance. It’s Romeo & Juliet as you’ve never quite seen it: familiar, yet startlingly alive.
Five actors navigate the labyrinth of Verona’s feuds and passions, embodying roles that, in traditional stagings, would require three times their number. Notably absent are Lady Capulet, the Montagues, and Benvolio, yet their shadows linger, felt through the nuance of performance and the charged silences that ripple between lines. Even the play’s famous opening brawl is reimagined with more tension than spectacle, setting the tone for a story that keeps everything simmering just beneath the surface.
The set is Juliet’s bedroom — part teenage dreamscape, part shrine. A heart-shaped doorway frames the space. Flowers spill like offerings. In one corner, a humble table serves as both the Friar’s apothecary and confessional. There are no scene changes, only shifts in velvet atmosphere. Juliet’s bed becomes a deathbed, then a tomb. The space doesn’t transform with drama but absorbs each moment quietly.
Much of the play takes place in and among the audience. When Romeo confesses his love to the Friar, Mercutio prowls through the crowd, shooting a bewildered glance at an audience member like, “You’re seeing this too, right?” Later, when Juliet drinks the potion, she walks slowly between seats, lit ghostly white, while the Nurse cries out to an empty bed. These moments aren’t just theatrical choices; they’re emotional ones. They invite you into the story without fanfare. You don’t watch this play so much as feel yourself inside it. The famous balcony scene doesn’t happen on a balcony at all. Romeo is already inside Juliet’s room, hiding and listening. It’s an intimate reworking that turns the scene inward, private and conspiratorial. Everything about this production feels like that: close, attentive, emotionally attuned.
Sound is used sparingly but with impact. Composer Brandon Read aligns each scene’s music to the body’s seven chakras. You may not notice the tuning explicitly, but you feel it as a hum of tension or a pulse of tenderness. Costuming echoes the same logic. Characters wear modern-day clothes styled to suggest the class structures of old Verona. The result is subtle and evocative, grounding the past in the present without losing either.
The ensemble’s performances are uniformly compelling. Ciarán O’Riordan plays Romeo with a kind of aching intensity: impulsive, headstrong, and completely consumed by love. His restlessness is tangible and his tenderness sincere. Charlotte Edwards brings a luminous duality to Juliet, with equal parts dreamer and rebel. Her performance moves effortlessly between innocence and fierce resolve, showing us that Juliet is not just in love, but also determined to shape her own ending.
Dallas Reedman’s Mercutio is a magnetic presence, witty and strange in all the right ways. He always seems slightly apart from the story, observing more than he says. When he’s gone, the absence feels like a shift in the room’s gravity. Jo Bloom, in a remarkable double role as both Tybalt and the Nurse, draws a clear line between fury and tenderness. Her Nurse is warm and grounded, someone you’d want in your corner. Her Tybalt simmers with quiet menace.
Charles Mayer plays both the Friar and Lord Capulet, moving with ease between spiritual calm and patriarchal frustration. As the Friar, he’s measured and sincere. As Capulet, his voice bristles with control that masks something softer underneath. This doubling never feels like a gimmick. It deepens the emotional world of the play, showing how care and authority can sometimes wear the same face.
What stays with you isn’t just what’s said, but the way it’s held. The pauses. The eye contact. The breath between decisions. This isn’t a production trying to modernise Shakespeare for the sake of it. It’s one that reaches out to where young audiences are now, offering humour, honesty, intimacy, and care. The company’s stated aim was to make Shakespeare more accessible for high school students studying the play. But what they’ve done is more generous. They’ve made it feel like it was written for us.
Performances ran from May 21st to May 24th 2025 at The Lounge, Chatswood Concourse. If it returns, catch it, not for spectacle, but for the way it lingers quietly, long after the lights go down and the song of love fades out.
