Dominic Dromgoole has got his fourth season in charge of the Globe off to an absorbing start with this story of the world’s favourite doomed teenage lovers. The season, which will also include As You Like It, Troilus & Cressida and Love’s Labour’s Lost, is dubbed Young Hearts. And young, for once, is really the word. Adetomiwa Edun, as Romeo, is 25 but doesn’t look it. Ellie Kendrick, as Juliet, is on her gap year before going to Cambridge. She looks as close to Juliet’s real age of 13 as you’re ever likely to see outside of a school play.

The contrast between their callow idealism and the adult mores that crush them makes Dromgoole’s production a refreshing reading of the text. All it needs, to seal the deal, is the passion between the leads that would make their love look like more than infatuation.

Edun speaks the verse easily and clearly. He’s limber, likeable, a natural aristocrat. But when his Romeo needs to enter a different dimension of despair or delight, anger or desperation, he struggles to go up a gear.

Much of the production’s emotional restraint is deliberate. Michael O’Hagan’s Montague greets the news of his son’s death so manfully that you wonder if he thinks Romeo’s just sleeping. Kendrick’s overt lack of sizzle makes her a curiously captivating heroine. When she addresses the audience, her steady articulacy in the face of deaths, banishments and revenge is an adorably level-headed yet wholly inadequate response to this sudden escalation. By contrast, Miranda Foster’s vengeful outbursts as Lady Capulet underlines that these grown-ups are just superannuated teenagers with body hair.

Romeo’s roaring boys are not so far from the confused young men of Spring Awakening. Philip Cumbus’s Mercutio, in particular, uses anger as his energy. He just pushes his luck too far on the wrong guy. His death is played matter-of-factly, and is all the more affecting for it. These boys don’t need hoodies for you to make the modern parallels.

Told sparely, with glorious harmonised songs between scenes, backed by period instruments, Dromgoole’s show has a simplicity that pulls you towards it. There are strong performances, too, from Ian Redford as a hearty Capulet who turns from party-hearty host to angry father without sacrificing sincerity, and Penny Layden as the (inevitably) northern nurse.

In fact, there’s not much to take against in a sinuous production that conveys a winning sense of young hearts adrift. It’s only a shame that you can never quite hear those hearts thumping in unison. Thanks be for the deft comedy here, the lack of melodrama. But at the concluding comment, “There never was a story of more woe, than this Juliet and her Romeo”, you can’t help wondering where some of that woe went.

Box office 020-7401 9919, in rep until August 23

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