WHEN I read the ecstatic reviews of the Splinter Group’s production when it came from New York to the Bath Shakespeare Festival in March, I wondered if some of my colleagues hadn’t been swigging something stronger and more mind-numbing than the local spa water. I mean to say: a cut, sliced and potted version of Romeo and Juliet as performed by four American boys in the dorm of a strict boarding school. I’d almost rather see King Lear revived by high-school cheerleaders.

Well, last night’s performance convinced me of my fellow critics’ sobriety and sense. I doubt if even on the New England mountain tops in the 1950s there was quite such innocence as radiated from Joe Calarco’s young, gulpingly enthusiastic cast; but the upside of that was great freshness and immediacy. Here was an adolescent’s eye-view of a play that is, after all, about adolescents who want to enjoy love, discover sex, and escape from constraints even tighter and more oppressive than at a school where pupils must sit to attention while reciting “amo, amas, amat” as if those words came from an army manual.

Dressed in their dull, grey, sleeveless jumpers, the boys begin tentatively, giggling at such double entendres as “tool” and “weapon”.

But soon the physical bravura turns serious. Pushing, pulling, tussling, whirling, tickling and other horseplay are followed by a scene in which three boys take the role of Capulet, debagging, kicking and humiliating Jason Spelbring’s Juliet. I’ve seldom seen teenage isolation, insecurity, vulnerability, and pain so touchingly evoked — and isn’t that what Shakespeare’s first great tragedy is all about?

Sonnets and extracts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are added to a piece in which there’s much doubling and virtually the only prop is a long red banner that’s used, tug-of-war-style, to suggest vendettas and violence. So those unfamiliar with the play may get confused. But the rewards include the grave, even solemn affection that gently burgeons between Spelbring’s Juliet and Matthew Sincell’s Romeo as well as a fierce Tybalt and a trundling old Nurse from Jason Dubin and a nice pairing of Mercutio and Friar Lawrence from Jeremy Beck.

The sum effect is an act of bardophilia, which is fine by me.

Shakespeare, it seems, can enlighten, release and maybe change. I’m not telling you which boy is left clutching a copy of Romeo and Juliet while the others return to their school drill; but it’s clear that he at least won’t end up an all-American robot.

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