Vic­tor­ia Uni­versity’s Romeo and Juliet is an utter tri­umph of stage­craft.

The mood with­in Stu­dio 77, the cam­pus’ main black­box theatre, seems fit­tingly Shakespearean as thun­der rolls over­head and rain pours down out­side. We’re all here to see Romeo and Juliet, argu­ably one of theatre’s most played-out stor­ies, but I’ve nev­er seen it quite like this.

Our cast, mem­bers of the Thea302 class, have found them­selves in an aban­doned theatre. As they dance about madly, and fill the space with their energy, they become some­how pos­sessed by the ghosts of Romeo and Juliet past, and draw the story out into the space with us.

The thrust stage, one of Shakespeare’s trade­marks, is used bril­liantly, and with much aban­don – I’m fairly sure I got bits of cauli­flower down my shirt at one point.

Want to know how an assort­ment of veget­ables factors into this bonkers equa­tion?

Well, you’ll just have to see the show.

Dir­ect­or Dr Lori Leigh has taken a play that is often seen as just a tragedy and made it into some­thing big­ger and bright­er. While there is, of course, still tragedy – we can­’t have a happy end­ing in this cau­tion­ary tale, after all – there is a bawd­i­ness and a joy to this piece that can­not be chal­lenged. We tend to focus on the sad­ness of this story – the war­ring of two fam­il­ies; bru­tal­ity, murder and grief – but in actu­al­ity, the first half can almost be read as a com­edy. It’s two horny teens, thrust togeth­er by cir­cum­stance, who want noth­ing more than to escape the bur­eau­cracy of their fam­il­ies and end up hap­pily togeth­er.

That is cer­tainly, uh, shown in this iter­a­tion.

Major kudos to the cast, crew, and dir­ect­or, who’ve made a well-known script utterly mad and beau­ti­ful. Our Romeo (Caleb Hill) and Juliet (Rosie Glover), played their roles with an incred­ible youth­ful vibrancy. Their rela­tion­ship was so intim­ate and lust­ful that it felt oddly voyeur­ist­ic to be watch­ing it, and I loved the strength with which it was por­trayed.

I’d also like to men­tion the role of the Nurse (played by Mol­lie Fox Fraser). Usu­ally I have a hard time with that char­ac­ter – as com­ic relief she’s always weirded me out – but Fraser played her with a legit­im­acy and an energy that trans­lated very well once the story star­ted to get dark­er.

Romeo and Juliet has more pop songs than you’d expect, a whole ton of dick jokes, and a earn­est heart that’ll stay with me for a long time. The cast was incred­ibly strong, there was a very power­ful aes­thet­ic, and the whole pro­duc­tion was an abso­lute delight to see. I hope to see these per­formers in oth­er things soon, because they’re all damn tal­en­ted.

What an abso­lutely bril­liant piece of theatre.