NEW York director Joe Calarco wasn't convinced by the prospect in store. He found himself in charge of an all-male production of Romeo And Juliet when the original director left for another job.

"It didn't seem an intriguing idea, especially as it was a play I hadn't enjoyed in performance. Nor did I like the all-men idea, but because of that I had to do something radical with it," he says.

The actors needed convincing too. "They weren't sure it would make sense, so I just said 'Well, you'll have to come to the rehearsals'," Joe recalls.

Calarco presented his cast with his new version set in a repressive American Catholic boarding school, where four boys 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 the process of exploring Romeo's doomed love for Juliet the boys awaken their own sexual feelings.

From a 14ft by 24ft theatre off off-Broadway in 1997, Calarco's production has since transferred to the Bath Shakespeare Festival and the Arts Theatre in the West End last year, and next week the Splinter Group presents Shakespeare's R & J at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds.

"When I created this adaptation I felt we could do whatever we wanted because everyone knows the story. For me, the play has never been as sexual and violent as I wanted it to be, so this production has been about finding the violence and the sexiness of the play again," Joe says.

"The idea of all-male casts in Shakespeare's times was of no interest to me, or if it had been I would have dressed them all as women. I think people expected an historical experiment, or they thought I'd make it political or camp and homoerotic, none of which I wanted to do. So I decided it had to be done in an all-male setting, which could be a school, a prison, the military or a locker room, and a Catholic boarding school seemed the most logical place."

Is he calling on personal experience? "I never went to boarding school but I was an outraged Catholic exposed to a lot of Catholic dogma, going to funerals and weddings," he says.

Calarco's stripped-down version of Romeo And Juliet seeks to unravel the most painful aspects of adolescence when feelings of passion and repression are at their most confusing, but he has not turned it into a study of nascent homosexuality.

"To make it homosexual would be to destroy it. The energy of the piece is how boys are with boys, men are with men, which is very different from how they are with women. There's a rudeness and lewdness to them," Joe says.

"None of them is gay in this play, and none of them becomes gay, because their understanding and acceptance of love wouldn't be as true if they were," Joe says.

"Doing the play the way we are, all the emotions of it, all the violence of it, the danger, the eroticism and the strength of the women in Romeo And Juliet, all come through, and it's the strength of the women that's really shocked people."

Shakespeare's R&J, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, February 23 to 28. Box office: 0113 213 7700.

Updated: 16:08 Thursday, February 19, 2004