ROMEO And Juliet had never been as sexual or violent on stage as New York director Joe Calarco wanted it to be.

So he set about re-directing the flow of teenage testosterone in an all-male version that strips the cast down to four boys at a repressive Catholic boarding school, who discover a banned copy of Shakespeare's play. Forbidden to read it by day, they begin a secret enactment after lights out, playing all the parts in Calarco's abridged version.

The production began life in a 14ft by 24ft theatre off off-Broadway in 1997 and is now on its first British tour, directed for the Splinter Group and Bath Theatre Royal by associate director Monica Henderson.

The school setting has been switched from America to England to accommodate a young British cast, but this is an unnecessary concession, partly because the accents lack the cut-glass tones of the English boarding schools of the play's unspoken setting of the 1950s, and partly because this production is missing an American nuance that made it distinctive in the first place.

Calarco's play opens with the four boys (Tom McKay, David Sturzaker, Daon Broni, Liam Evans-Ford) struggling for air as they recite lessons in parrot fashion and move from stultifying classroom to classroom in militaristic marching steps. From beneath a floorboard, the boys in white-shirted school uniforms pull out a copy of Romeo And Juliet wrapped inside a length of cloth in the suitably sinful colour of red. That cloth will go on to become the ultimate prop, used for blood, a rapier, bed linen, feminine clothing and sensuality and a rope from which to hang.

Two chairs, a small table and torchlight are used too, and the book is passed between the boys, picked up, read and dropped in shock, as a constant reminder that the students are discovering it for the first time as much as they are discovering the meaning of love.

This is not to suggest Shakespeare's R&J is a homosexual reinvention of Shakespeare's play, even if placing it in a 20th century English public school is bound to stir up such thoughts. Calarco said, "To make it homosexual would destroy it". Take him at his word, and what comes through stronger is the strength required by the women in the feuding macho world of Romeo And Juliet.

This production falls just short of the anticipated rapture and radical revelation, but like in Lord Of The Flies, the boys learn much about themselves. "I dreamt a dream tonight" says one, shaking, alone in torchlight at the finale. "I dreamt...", his words fail him. He has seen the full horror of male repression.

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Updated: 09:55 Tuesday, February 24, 2004