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MICHAEL FENTIMAN:The challenge for anyone directing Romeo and Juliet is that the expectation from it is for it to be romantic. It's literature's great love poem.

MARIAH GALE:Romeo. Romeo. Wherefore art thou Romeo?

MICHAEL FENTIMAN:In this production one thing that became interesting to explore, which isn't always the choice that people take with the scene, was that for that moment Romeo and Juliet become trapped in a bubble.

MARIAH GALE:It's that feeling of kind of me and you against the world and then them seeing each other and recognising something in that other person like they're on a sort of island.

MICHAEL FENTIMAN:In order to bring the romance to the front of the lens we've allowed Romeo and Juliet to forget about the fighting between their two families. As soon as they're in the company of each other they're able to bend time.

MARIAH GALE:Myself and Sam, who play Romeo and Juliet, we start out in modern dress and then we end up in Elizabethan dress and all the rest of the cast are in Elizabethan dress all the way through.

MARIAH GALE:A lot of people have a different interpretation of what that might mean and what that reflects in the play but from my perspective as Juliet, I think it's kind of about when you're a teenager, feeling isolated from the society that you've been born into feeling like you're in a world that doesn't understand you or that you can't connect with.

JOSEPH ARKLEY:Romeo and Juliet is a play that essentially I think is a love story but I think with our interpretation of it, it's much more muscular than that. The kind of violence that we're trying to portray in it is much more graphic. Act three, scene one is certainly when it goes into this tragic territory.

JONJO O'NEILL:'Come sir. Will you pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears? Make haste, lest mine be about your ears ere it be out.' What we were after was trying to create a game. A fight, you know, we're boys, we're getting a bit wild. Looking in each other's eyes daring each other "Come on, come on." You know?'

JOSEPH ARKLEY:It was a brilliant, brilliant kind of rehearsal process. Discovering ways that this fight could operate. It's 'boys with toys' stuff really.

JOSEPH ARKLEY:That was one of the first conversations I had with Rupert the director. He… His first thing he said to me was, "What weapons do you think Tybalt should have?"

JOSEPH ARKLEY:So that instantly put us into that kind of territory and that's where we came up with this… This bladed claw device. Usually it's just a little knife that he pulls out at the last minute and stabs Mercutio but we wanted something that Tybalt had actually crafted so that he could still flick out at any moment.

JOSEPH ARKLEY:So they managed to get me this brilliant contraption where I press a little button on this claw and this blade pings out.

ROMEO:Hold Tybalt! Good Mercutio!

JOSEPH ARKLEY:The rope idea was just a device in order for us to kind of play this push and pull game and also to show how skilled both the fighters are in lassoing each other as well as using sword play.

JOSEPH ARKLEY:Playing villains are-- It's an old cliché but they are the funnest roles particularly someone like Tybalt.

JOSEPH ARKLEY:There's such scope for what you can do with that character because he's just on a mission to destruct really.

JOSEPH ARKLEY:Romeo. The love I bear thee can afford no better term than this. Thou art a villain.

JOSEPH ARKLEY:I'm playing him like a Glaswegian nutcase. Just Glaswegian gave it a different kind of shape in the mouth and it made me physically feel as if I could attack this world what Tom Scutt's done with that costume as well you feel kind of taller and broader on that stage.

JOSEPH ARKLEY:'Cause on paper I'm quite a tall, lanky guy but with those words and the costume and the way we've set it it's just fantastic to play something that so completely different to me.

RICHARD KATZ:How now wife? Have you delivered to her our decree?

CHRISTINE ENTWISLE:Aye but she will none of it.

MARIAH GALE:The scene with Lord and Lady Capulet at the breakfast table, well it's not actually officially a breakfast scene. The director Rupert decided that he thought it would have a big impact if he made the scene very domestic.

MARIAH GALE:And Capulet's language is very, very violent and I think the sort of contrast between that really intimate and domestic situation and then that, sort of, threat of violence is quite… I think it's quite a powerful way to set the scene.

RICHARD KATZ:Is she not proud? Doth she not count her blessed? Unworthy as she is, that we have wrought so worthy a gentleman to be her bride.

RICHARD KATZ:I'm a great believer in saying what you see. If it's there, use it, you know? If you've got a cup, drink from it, there's an orange, eat it. And so, we have-- I want to make it look like a real breakfast scene, I want it to look like the sopranos.

RICHARD KATZ:You know? Or some-- You know, in Eastenders when some-- [GRUNTING]

MARIAH GALE:Good father, I beseech you on my knees, hear me with patience but to speak a word.

RICHARD KATZ:Hang thee, young baggage. Disobedient wretch. I tell thee what: get thee to church o' Thursday, or never after look me in the face. Speak not. Reply not. Do not answer me. My fingers itch.

CHRISTINE ENTWISLE:From my character's point of view one of the click moments was to create this sort of balding wig for me which has these sort of tufts of hair it makes me look very ill and very vulnerable.

CHRISTINE ENTWISLE:I put this wig on and I just sort of knew a lot more about her at that point.

CHRISTINE ENTWISLE:Marry child, early next Thursday morn, the gallant, young and noble gentleman The County Paris, at Saint Peter's Church, shall happily make thee there a joyful bride!

MARIAH GALE:Now, by Saint Peter's Church and Peter too, he shall not make me there a joyful bride.

CHRISTINE ENTWISLE:And of course as well, Lady Capulet's in her nighty and so is very naked and vulnerable because the rest of the time she presents such a powerful force. She's all façade really and then at the breakfast table in her own house you see what she's really like which is, you know, chain-smoking, vulnerable, slightly bitter and disturbed.

CHRISTINE ENTWISLE:My favourite sort of characters.

MARIAH GALE:That scenario is kind of universally recognisable. It could kind of be any age, anywhere. It's such a universal scene and so I think, hopefully, that makes it more accessible to an audience and we can all identify with one of those characters around that table.