Star-cross'd lovers

The audience at the UK premiere of an all-male take on Romeo and Juliet must prepare itself for a testosterone-fuelled shock to the system, writes Paul Taylor

Say it ever so softly, for fear of being struck dead, but don't you find that sitting through Romeo and Juliet is – more often than not – both a chore and a bore? If ever a nascent genius's ardent, poetically soaring and oddly quirky first attempt at love-tragedy has been dulled by repetition, and staled by routine restaging, it is this piece, written by Shakespeare just as he hit his thirties.

A production needs to project an indelible sense of the hot blood and hormonal storms of adolescence, and of the horrendous pressures on the young in feud-ridden Verona. But instead of the vertiginous high of testy testosterone and of hatred and hard-ons, you tend to be palmed off with yesterday's dinner warmed up – the stagings full of fake ferocity and decaffeinated drive. And for every brilliant reworking of the piece, such as Leonard Bernstein's immortal West Side Story, or the Baz Luhrmann movie, there are fluffed near-misses and outright stinkers – witness, in the past year, a Chichester production that relocated the play (in a bid for topicality) within the Muslim/Christian frictions of 16th-century Constantinople; and Gerard Presgurvic's frightful Euro-pop version, recently inflicted on the West End, which had all the authentic emotional surge of Neighbours ("It was the night of my life, Juliet. Thanks.") crossed with Fame Academy.

Now, prepare for a bracing and brilliant shock to the system. Next week, as one of a clutch of shows from abroad visiting the Bath Shakespeare Festival, Britain gets its first taste of Shakespeare's R & J, an inspired new theatrical take on this early masterpiece. It's all-male; it's stripped down to the bone scenically; it uses Romeo and Juliet as a play-within-a-play; and it reawakens Shakespeare's text in a way that blows your mind and senses. I saw a public dress rehearsal of it last week in New York. Now, I am aware that, when abroad, we critics can "go native" and overrate things out of sheer adrenalin rush or culturally skewed perception. God knows, the whole hype of the Edinburgh Fringe battens off that syndrome. But I don't think I'm ever going to regret saying that R & J gave me the biggest Shakespearean – and non-Shakespearean – thrill I have had in the theatre in some time.

Four young actors, dressed in a kind of institutional uniform of shirt, ties and black trousers, march round the acting area. They are evidently students at a military academy that, from the whispered confessions and the prayers that are babbled with would-be fervour, is Roman Catholic in ideology. One of the great things about the piece – which is artfully assembled from pre-existing pieces of text by its director, Joe Calarco – is that it doesn't waste time with laborious explanation. You're pitched straight into this world and you have to pick up its weird rules fast.

There are, in effect, only two props. One is a bolt of vibrant scarlet cloth that is pulled and twisted by the young men in ways that symbolise the conflicts that are unfolding. Looking at what they do with it, and how this length of material is exercised in tugs-of-war and tugs-of-love, reminds you that the word "between" is richly ambiguous – it can denote both what joins us and what pulls us apart. The playwright Howard Barker once defined the best theatre as "the good that is between us"; but what is between may also be mortally bad. And there, in a nutshell (superbly visualised) is one deep aspect of the play.

The other prop is a single hardback copy of the play that has been smuggled into the school like some samizdat newspaper surreptitiously passed round in a totalitarian state. So already, Shakespeare's text has become potential dynamite, and the pressures of Verona a peculiar distorted-mirror version of the pressures in this academy. On the plane home from New York, I watched Peter Mullan's superb recent movie, The Magdalene Sisters, about the exploitation of young women in Catholic convents in the 1960s. There's a particularly upsetting scene in which the girls are lined up naked and the grotesque Mother Superior cackles in delight at their near-to-tears – a ghastly aversion therapy designed to induce them to hate and fear their own budding sensu- ality. Shakespeare's R & J projects that same pressure- cooker intensity – only here, the adult administration is implied rather than physically present. It's as though these young guys have so internalised the ethos here that they are left alone to destroy one another, like the boys in Lord of the Flies. Reading and acting out Romeo and Juliet has both a libera-ting and an unhinging effect on them. The atmosphere becomes feral and dangerous.

A big success in the States, where it has been a work-in-progress for nearly four years now, it's a show that has wide appeal. It embraces Shakespeare buffs, who will note how cleverly the intermittent interpolations from A Midsummer Night's Dream remind you that that play is Romeo and Juliet's comic twin. Also, that Dream contains, in the "Pyramus and Thisbe" inset drama, its own farcical version of the Romeo and Juliet story. That's like (mirrors within mirrors) the way that Romeo and Juliet is the play-within-a-play in the drama of Shakespeare's R & J.

Joe Calarco and his smart young producer Seth Goldstein are right to insist that this is not a "gay" version of the tragedy. The actors are powerfully attractive individuals, and the men in the play are intensely turned on by each other. But it's a world without women, so this could be faute de mieux. We don't know. The piece is about the difficulties of coming to terms with masculinity – of which homosexuality is only one aspect. People of all sexual persuasions will feel a stirring in the loins, but more importantly, your heart goes out to these young men.

It is highly likely that the piece will move on from Bath (and from the Belgrade, Coventry, which it is also visiting) to London. Any West End producer with sense would fight to get hold of this production. The show would work brilliantly in a small Edwardian theatre such as the New Ambassadors or the Duchess. With this important difference. When Deborah Warner transformed the Victorian Garrick a few years ago for her staging of Beckett's Footfall, she boarded over the seats and angled the bare-bulb-lit event so the audience had their backs to the stage. Well, the pent-up energies of Shakespeare's R & J could be wired up still higher, if you put it on an Edwardian stage that had been built so it covered the whole of the stalls, with the audience on a level with and around the protagonists. It would be the perfect scenic metaphor, doing to the space what Joe Calarco's play does to the tired old warhorse that Romeo and Juliet all too often becomes.

I know that the makers of this show are apprehensive about a backlash in this country, fearing that we will respond with: hands off "our" Shakespeare, you Yankee upstarts, and leave our theatres alone, too, thank you very much. It will be very depressing if this happens. It's worth remembering that the greatest revivifications of this play in the postwar period have been mostly by "foreigners": Bernstein, Zeffirelli, Luhrmann... and now its the turn of the excellent Splinter Group from New York. Shakespeare is not "ours", he's everybody's – and with a bottomless genius such as him, we are all of us still on a learning curve.

'Shakespeare's R & J', Theatre Royal, Bath (01225 448844), 11-15 March; Belgrade Theatre, Coventry (02476 553055), 18-22 March