Male remake of love tale

They are magical. They are sensational. Four young Americans, Jeremy Beck, Jason Dubin, Matthew Sincell and Jason Michael Spelbring, perform a version of Romeo and Juliet on an almost bare stage.

They do not try to ape feminity, but manage to give the old play a dream-like strangeness, with adrenalin and amphetamine shots of vitality. The adaptation by Joe Calarco, who also directs the cast at the daredevil speed of an emergency vehicle, ran for a year in New York and no wonder. R&J surpasses the single-sex Shakespeare productions that have proliferated in London this year.

Calarco presents four students from a repressive, Catholic boarding school, who come upon a copy of Romeo and Juliet. One night after lights out, attracted by intimations of immorality, they hesitantly begin to enact the tragedy and are catapulted into a theatrical world of sexual excitement and makebelieve far better than the daily grind.

At first, in brief, caricatured scenes the youths intone "amo-amas-amat" like 10-year-olds drilling, pray and confess. But this gross definition of single-sex school life gives way to the rapt, believable process in which the boys, dressed in dull grey uniform, are bewitched by the sensuality of Shakespeare's tragedy. At the end, Sincell's Romeo is left sitting alone, quite unable to abandon his role.

On an atmospherically lit stage, whose backcloth turns blue for dawn and scarlet for murder, a swathe of red cotton becomes an instrument of aggression and is ultimately used to strangle Tybalt. Calarco has filleted the original play, strangely omitting some great set-pieces, but leaving the framework intact.

He has an absolutely brilliant central idea. He matches Shakespeare's portrayal of forbidden love with the students' worried discovery of the illicit, homoerotic desire that their performance as Romeo and Juliet ignites in them. Sincell's Romeo and Jason Michael Spelbring's fine Juliet are formal at first, but cannot resist each other lips.

This is not, though, a gay, high-school reading of Romeo and Juliet: Calarco generally runs scared of graphic love scenes. His production, which lends the dramatic moments of murder a hushed, searing intensity, is best in scenes of grief, as when Jeremy Beck's shattering Mercutio almost whispers his dying curses and Jason Dubin's Nurse reacts to Juliet's apparent death in broken murmurs. A knock-out.

Booking to 18 October. Box office: 020 7836 3334.

Shakespeare's R & J