bright idea of making the balcony scene clumsy and awkward,
but it turned the interchange of Shakespeare's perhaps rather too ingcniouslY interwoven love sonnets into long-winded and unconvincing prattle. John Stride and Judy Dench here both lacked the steely delicacy to re- produce the filigree fineness of this early Shake- spearian verse, but later, when passion and despair grip them, they found the right pace and intensity for their words. I especially admired the producer's courage in allowing Romeo to literally weep and sob and roll pitiably about the floor at the news of his banishment. It is all in the text, of course, but few producers and even fewer actors dare follow those instructions so trustinglY. Miss Dcnch, too, sheds her kittenishness when she lolls on the bed aching for love and, even more effectively, when she stands wide-eyed and soul-stabbed at the threat of her husband's exile.
This Romeo and Juliet is sometimes operatic in the pejorative sense of the word. It has some grotesquely over-grimacing comic servants, and tiresome bouts of leaden knockabout. I
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