By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: *****

WHEN? Friday 27 March, opens 31 March and runs through 20 June 2026 RUNTIME: 175 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

Sink may have found worldwide fame with Netflix’s Stranger Things but the 23-year-old has been performing in theatre since 2011 including as the lead in Annie on Broadway and being nominated for a Tony as Best Actress last year for John Proctor Is The Villain which has just opened in London.

• Read on for reasons including how Sadie Sink is a mesmerising heroine in this production which breathes new life into a classic

She brings a wide-eyed sense of teenage wonder and thrill to this Robert Icke (Player Kings, Noel Coward Theatre) take on Shakespeare’s tragedy of star-crossed lovers.

We 1st meet her sleeping and apparently dreaming in an onstage bed accompanied by Icke’s trademark ticking clock, this time a digital projection, where she is concealing her Romeo, a lesser known Noah Jupe, naked but for a pair of boxers who gives as good as he gets in the joint titular role.

Clare Perkins (Bacchae, National Theatre) is fantastically bawdy as the Nurse who wants the best for Juliet but can’t help but be concerned by how quickly she is growing up and falling in love with a man she has just met.

Kasper Hilton-Hille shines also as a doomed and repeatedly buttocks-bearing Mercutio as the opposing houses of Capulet and Montague swell to bring down a union that threatens to bring them together.

There are occasional out-of-time elements in this otherwise faithful Shakespeare retelling and we can forgive Icke’s continued obsession with telling us the time because in this case it explains how quickly these unlikely events spin wildly out of control.

Jupe’s star may not yet shine as brightly as Sink’s but we loved how his Romeo descended from the stage into the audience, repeatedly hid in the front row and often made his way passed those sitting there as he sought to observe his new love unseen by her.

The risk one runs by staging this classic is that the West End hasn’t been short of recent Romeo and Juliets with Jamie Lloyd‘s in 2024 not quite going full balcony and Rebecca Frecknall‘s candlelit version in 2023 but Sink’s heartbreaking Juliet is reason enough to see this.

We loved quite how young and enthusiastic this preview audience was and there’s a real pep of excitement about everything in this must-see production.

Cancelled previews are never a good look – see Cynthia Erivo’s recent difficult Dracula – but Sadie Sink’s Romeo and Juliet shows no such signs of late challenges.

You might be familiar with the Romeo and Juliet story but Sadie Sink is a mesmerising heroine in this production which breathes new life into a classic.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy ATG Tickets
• Have you seen a Robert Icke show before and what did you think of this 1? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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