Romeo & Juliet has remained one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays – ever since its first performance in 1595 or 1596: we have no exact date. The shifting moods of adolescence have never been better dramatized.

“For now these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.”

A blazing hot summer in Verona. Tension is in the air as two of the town’s leading families clash in street brawls, stirring up ancient animosities the cause of which  has long been forgotten.

It is a play that is by turns delicate and intense, uproariously funny, obscene, and always heartbreaking. Shakespeare expended some of his finest lyrical verse on this story of two star-crossed lovers.

Director Matthew O’Sullivan brings an intimate knowledge of the play to this 2007 Globe production.

He first appeared in Romeo & Juliet in 1967 in a Royal Shakespeare Company production starring Ian Holm at Stratford-on-Avon. Some years later he directed the play in New Zealand (and played Mercutio) in a production that one critic called “sheer exhilaration”.

In the 1970’s he played the Chorus and the Prince in a Nimrod Theatre production by John Bell starring Mel Gibson and Angela Punch-McGregor.

This new production will be set in the late Renaissance period (what the director prefers to call “modified Renaissance”) but will be entirely modern in approach.

The cast will feature several members of the Globe’s core ensemble who have previously appeared in King Lear, The Tempest and Hamlet,  including Alan Faulkner, Les Asmussen , Anthony Hunt and the Globe’s director and founder, Diana Denley, after many years of producing and directing, will return to the stage to play the nurse.Tony Youlden will design and light Verona; Music and Choreography will be created by Guy McEwan.

“Feuding families, old hatreds, mindless violence, the stupidity of the old, the innocence of the young – what could be more contemporary”, says Matthew O’Sullivan, “I can’t wait to start work on it”.