My Favourite Game: Reading 3 Hull City 1, November 19, 2005

"Enjoy this. Because you'll probably never see anything like it again."

With every year that passes, my dad's words to me during one game in Reading's record-breaking 2005/06 season become more and more accurate.

It is somewhat disheartening knowing, at that time, deep deep down, as a 15-year-old you are likely seeing something that your club will never better. Better than any generation of your family so far has seen and better than any future generations might see. Indeed, that, coupled with all the other baggage that comes with supporting a football club these days, has probably left me with a growing amount of ennui. 

But, much like every night out beginning with the remote and vague but possible of recreating that one perfect piss-up from so many moons ago, it's the hope that keeps you coming back. 

There are so many glorious matches to pick out from that season - the Crystal Palace five-goal thriller, the top-of-the-table victory over a Neil Warnock-led Sheffield United, 13 goals in eight days over Christmas, countless pummellings, and the trio of glories of promotion at Leicester, securing the title at home to Derby and the points record at home to QPR 

But my favourite game is none of these. It isn't even what I would argue was the best performance of the season - the late-January 4-0 eviseration of a decent Norwich side who were barely allowed a forward step, let alone being able to lay a glove. 

No, my favourite is what looks, on-paper, a routine 3-1 win at home to Hull City on November 19. It is the fact it was routine is what makes it do astounding.

As any fan of an average football club knows, disaster is around the corner - dominance only creates foreboding.

But, this game, proved the 05/06 season was different. 

Reading took the lead early through Bobby Convey before Nicky Barmby equalised ten minutes into the second half, completely against the run of play. 

What followed was like a giant being jabbed sharply in the chest. Hull were dotted aside with two goals in a minute (one a glorious Kevin Doyle overhead kick from 16 yards out). It was like a boxer wearing one on their chin, stirring themselves and quickly restoring some order. 

The unbeaten record was stretched to 18 games.

Though strangely we were still a point behind leaders Sheffield United, it was not even the end of November and promotion already felt inevitable. The rest of the season was now something to savour. 

I cannot remember now after which game my dad said the above words to me. But this one feels appropriate. 

As always, it's the hope that gets you

Hope. Hope is what brings you to that stadium match after match after match, often despite your better judgement. Hope is what makes you think your lumbering striker, floundering goalkeeper or error-prone centre back will confound the critics today.

Hope is what gives you the idea that this year is different, this year might be the year your play off duck is broken.

Hope dashed. Hope dashed is what makes you question why you come back to that stadium time and again. Hope dashed is what makes you think why the manager keeps sticking with that lumbering striker, floundering goalkeeper and error-prone centre back.

Hope dashed was Monday.

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What provided the hope this time around was how the team had gone about its business this season – tactical versatility to counter different teams (both Fulham games a case in point), a steely resolve to see out games (note the countless single goal margin wins) and a strong sense of spirit and purpose (see 3-2 away wins at Bristol City and Blackburn).

Time and time again this season (now last season I guess), we saw things a lot of Reading teams couldn’t do, or very rarely did, in the past – play with three at the back, play a proper 4-3-3, see out one goal leads, make comebacks…and also collapse in spectacular fashion away from home.

This gave hope that we had the skillsets to compete and overcome on Monday. We didn’t.

It felt either as if we froze somewhat or more played the occasion rather than the opponent. Or Huddersfield just sussed us out.

Regardless, the nagging feeling is we didn’t play to our potential. That perhaps is another factor of what made it such a galling day.

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It was fitting our best performer was Danny Williams in a season when his value to this team and his quality was finally recognised.

All year, in either a two-man or three-man midfield, the American offered something none of our other midfield options could – a balance between strength, mobility and passing quality. For all of our decent midfielders this year, none could do what Williams consistently did.

In a game where precious few Reading players excelled, Williams was probably our stand-out. In a similar vein to Steve Sidwell in the 06/07 season, Williams has never shirked a challenge this season despite knowing it could be his last with the club.

His devastatingly tearful reaction at the end suggested to me this will be the end of his Reading career – if we had gone up, I think he would have signed a new deal but he is 28 now and has the quality to player in the top tier; it is most likely now or never for him.

If he does move on, he absolutely deserves his chance and not one Reading fan should begrudge him that. He gave everything and more on Monday.

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The most painful of losing a play-off final isn’t the not getting promoted. The ambivalence toward being a part of the bottom-half Premier League football is growing – without wishing to sound like sour grapes, what really is the point of hoping to survive each year with nought much else to look forward to?

If you haven’t experienced the top tier already, that feeling is less prevalent and understandably so – I was very much looking forward to being part of the Premier League circus back in 2006 and I do sincerely hope Huddersfield enjoy it.

But there is an increasing ‘what’s the point to it?’ when you’ve been there, done that, got the overpriced T-shirt.

No, the reason why losing a play-off final aches to the very soul is your team has missed out after 48 matches and nine months of blood, spit, sweat, tears, fears, beers, joys, disappointments, exhilarations and more. 

It hurts all the more so after a penalty shoot out when you haven’t actually lost the game.

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Nothing in your football watching life prepares you for the intensity of penalty shoot-out in a final.

That said, watching Reading fully prepares you to expect to lose a penalty shoot-out in a final. My celebrations for each successful penalty were barely more than a look to the sky – for Al-Habsi’s penalty save, it was nothing than a single fist pump. It just felt as if things could go wrong.

After play-off final losses via being 2-0 up with a penalty, a freak own goal and a comeback thwarted by less than the width of a post, a penalty shoot-out loss felt likely to be added to the roll call.

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It is now three full days on from the final whistle. Only today have I felt anything like normal.

Tuesday was a day of nothing but mental and emotional exhaustion – a drained out hollow shell trying to make it through the day without reading any match reports or opinion pieces, glancing at Twitter and switching the channel over every time you heard the words “£170m match”.

Wednesday was the hangover from this – the mood slightly lifted but the baggage still being dragged along, the disappointment etched still on your face and the engagement with the rest of the human race still not quite fulsome.

The disappointment will probably last a little while yet, especially as the fallout from the result becomes clear – what happens with Stam? How do the new owners fit in? Which players will leave and who will we sign?

However, the talk has already begun of looking to next year’s fixture list, what away days to do, pre-season tours…

That’s the thing with football there is always next year, there is always hope.

Joining the Sky Blue army at Wembley

On Sunday afternoon, I’ll be at Wembley watching a team which play in blue and white for the third occasion.
On the previous two occasions, I didn’t really care for the result – Reading were underdogs in both games so it was more about enjoying the day. Though it being Reading, on both days they still managed to draw me in to caring, deeply, via a stirring but futile comeback and coming within one decent pass of an unlikely upset, respectively. Cue days of sulking afterwards.
But this Sunday has a bit of a different feeling about it as I’m to watch Coventry City play Oxford United in the EFL Trophy final – the first time I’ve been to a game involving two English league sides, one of whom isn’t Reading.
I’m going as my girlfriend’s family are Coventry fans and it sounded like some fun, going to a final at Wembley without my mood for the next week dependant on the outcome of the game.
However, I am emphatically an advocate of the idea that you can’t really enjoy a game of football in the flesh without having some kind of vested interest – your team is playing, you’ve got a bet on, it’s an overseas team who you have always liked but not supported. That kind of thing.
But I now find myself rather looking forward to Sunday hoping more and more that Coventry win.
I suspect this is because I’ve invented reasons for me to have a vested interest:
· Cov are playing Oxford, which gets my Royal blue and white blood pumping that little bit faster.
· Ex-Reading cup hero Yakubu (still only 29-years-old…) is on Cov’s books, as is Stuart Beavon, son of his namesake father who played 400 odd times for Reading before I was even born and we share a Jay Tabb in common.
· All of the issues Cov fans have had to put up with over the past decade with their ownership, stadium situation and so on (added to the fact they’ve not finished in the top six of any league for 47 years) plus the way their season is going this year, makes me think they deserve this.
· Maybe I’ve missed backing a desperately poor team, it being close to 20 years since Reading occupied the same relegation zone Coventry occupy now.
· The original individual shaping a club - Jimmy Hill.
· Dion Dublin, Darren Huckerby and Noel Whelan in the mid-to-late 1990s.
· The exciting adventures of Steve Ogrizovic (taker of the wickets of Viv Richards, Chris Broad and Alvin Kallcharran while playing for Shropshire, hoax Kazakhstan kidnapping, goal scorer and all that)
· Brian Kilcline. Just Brian Kilcline, nothing further to add.
· A Cov win will make for a far more enjoyable train journey home.
So yeah, let’s all sing together, play up, Sky Blues.

A new flavour of promotion push

Tuesday night’s classic come from behind win against Brentford got me thinking about how our successful Championship level teams have worked.

The shape this season is taking is markedly different to any of our other previously successful seasons at this level – successful meaning we won the league or got to the play offs and excluding 94/95 (I was five at the time so am not in a position to comment).

This isn’t the 05/06 season, for obvious reasons, it isn’t 2010/11 where we benefitted from one player being in the form of his life (Shane Long) and it isn’t 08/09 when we convinced and then spectacularly collapsed.

This year is more like the 02/03 and 11/12 seasons where the sum of the parts was the key reason for success (obviously 05/06 had that same factor but the quality of player was far greater).

But in 02/03, we had a system which worked a treat but when Nicky Forster was injured, we  struggled to cope, and the 11/12 season saw us wedded to the Plan A of four-four-fucking-two which, in the season after, showed up the limitations of that side.

We’ve gone through all manner of formational tweaks this season – three, four or five at the back, wing-backs, no strikers, four centre midfielders – which is a significant difference to the 11/12 season and an ability likely to be of use in the Premier League. That said I think most fans still believe the team would struggle next year if we were to be promoted come May.

This is a strange kind of team – its limitations can be seen from the fact we haven’t really dicked anyone this year and we have, in turn, been thoroughly dicked ourselves on occasion. But the team spirit and the tactics (both Stam’s ideas and the team’s embracing of those ideas) alleviate this.

It is arguable this is something Reading fans haven’t experienced before, certainly in my lifetime; a team which shifts and evolves game-to-game and even mid-game rather than having a set system which works and sticking to it.

And this is all down to Stam and Tevreden.

Further, it shouldn’t be forgotten that this has been a revolutionary past year – a dozen new signings, a new manager and a new director of football in the summer, an extra five signings in January and the constant ownership uncertainty between and lingering.

To be keeping pace with the top two at this stage of the season is nothing short of remarkable and to reach the play-offs this year would be a stunning achievement.

These are points needed to secure 6th place in the last ten seasons - 74, 78, 72, 68, 75, 75, 70, 74, 70, 75 – an average of 73.

Put another way, that’s four more wins from our remaining 14 games. To compare, Fulham have to win more than half of their remaining games (8 of 15) to reach the 73 point mark.

But whatever happens from this point on, this season should be marked as a success.

A trip to Dortmund; how perception and self awareness is holding back stadium atmospheres in England

At the start of last month, I followed the now very well-travelled route to Dortmund and a pilgrimage to the Westfalendstadion.
And, lets get it out of the way, yes, it was as awe-inspiring as everyone says; fantastic football, a goosebump-inducing atmosphere (admittedly aided by a 4-1 scoreline), a visually striking stadium, knowledgeable, friendly and generous fans – the complete package really.
But what really struck was how much of what was going on, if it had been taking place in and around an English football stadium, would be castigated as ‘plastic’ by a lot of English football fans:
-Club song played loudly over the speakers so an ‘organic atmosphere cannot be created’? Check.
-Flag-waving on the pitch? Check.
-Stadium announcer? Check.
-Supporters buying overpriced food and drink? Check.
-Every piece of branded tat imaginable (and a BVB version of Cluedo) in the club shop? Check.
But despite these perceived impingements on ‘real’ football culture, the revered BVB atmosphere remains (maybe it really is the right to drink booze in the ground...). It was all about working through a catalogue of songs and waving flags a lot no matter what was going on the pitch. Go 1-0 down? Keep singing. Striker miss a sitter? Restart the song where you left off.
Which I found rather unusual. For me it served to highlight, in an English football ground, the remaining need nearly always for if not an air of violence but certainly an antagonism and schadenfreude towards the ‘other’ (team or referee) to create an atmosphere.
This was particularly highlighted for me on Monday at the Bristol City – Reading game at the impressively refurbished Ashton Gate. Both of Bristol City’s goals were marked by many of their fans giving the big one to those in the away end and, subsequently, Reading’s comeback of three goals in 18 minutes to snatch a win also featured plenty of Vs flicked and wrists waved, though I’d say joy was probably the overriding emotion (as it should be with a last-minute winner).
In England, the noise from away followings is often similar to that of BVB fans in Dortmund; more or less detached to what is happening on the pitch (as away fans are usually the ‘hardcore’, there to make noise and enjoy the day regardless of the result).
It is the atmosphere created by home fans which is, with some honourable exceptions, anodyne, as you might have heard once or twice before. It is the stadiums and fans which have ‘plastic’ elements (Leicester’s happy clappy things, Crystal Palace’s flag culture) which generally are far noisier and atmospheric.
A lot has been said about what English football can learn from the culture of German cousins. Perhaps a precious attitude over who or what is allowed to make an atmosphere is something different to be taken on board.

The Dustbin Lid Challenge (that was its actual name)

Way back in March, before the uncertainty caused by Brexit, Trump and all that, it seemed perfectly OK to try an eating challenge as, unlike now, there was no danger of impending economic doom making food a scarce resource in the UK.
To be clear, I do find eating challenges morally dubious but we’re all hypocrites so pass the bib.
I and a couple of friends opted for a Flaming Grill pub in Reading (to give a venue where the toilet was flooded the title of a restaurant would be a stretch) and took on its Dustbin Lid Challenge.
It appears the Dustbin Lid Challenge is no longer served at Flaming Grill pubs, as far as I can see, so I cannot recall precisely what meat-based cholesterol enhancer was laid out before us. But, from memory, it was:
- a beef patty, chicken breast and a piece of gammon, each weighing some pounds, with various pieces of concessionary salad wrapped up a bun
-a set of beef ribs, presumably belonging to the cow equivalent of The Big Show
- strips of fried chicken
- onion rings
- a double portion of French fries
- a small bowl of disconcertingly cold pulled pork accompanied by cheesy nachos
- corn on the cob
- a portion of baked beans
Now, the fact it came served in a dustbin lid screamed that this was a bad idea. I mean, the only respectable individual to serve a meal on a dustbin lid was probably Top Cat, and he is a) fictional and b) would serve up something distinctly unappetising like a fish skeleton, immediately setting off imagery association issues in one’s head.
Regardless, we got underway. Now, I’ve watched enough Man Vs Food back in the day to know some consumption challenges tactics – leaves the starchy items to the end, choose a light drink to accompany your meal, keep everything moist to help force it down your oesophagus etc.
I promptly ignored all of these theories. Already I had bought  a pint of moderately-priced lager first up for the simple reason my friend had and so male ego was in play and I dived in to the chips first up (I mean, there’s nothing worse cold chips, right?).
And progress was surprisingly smooth – down went the chips, the ribs, the onion rings, the pulled pork with nachos, the corn and the beans within 20 minutes or so and all was well with the world despite knowing our fellow diners were glancing over with feelings of equal part disgust and pity, looks usually reserved for pets that eat their own vomit.
But, looming, always unnerving in the consciousness like that chronic back pain you try to ignore, was the monstrosity of a beef, chicken and gammon burger. The increasingly room-temperature mountain of meat sat on the corner of my dustbin lid.
Steely-eyed, the time came to tackle this unnatural abomination. Break through the wall.
Two mouthfuls of eating this like a conventional burger simply did not work – richness erupted on the taste buds, beyond that which is pleasurable, as three types of meat fought for supremacy. There is a now obvious a reason why you get four-bird roasts and pigs in blankets but not hybrid cow/ pig/ chicken mixtures.
How about taking the deconstructing approach? The way to eat an elephant, after all, is one mouthful at a time.
We were getting somewhere; the chicken’s gone, so has the top half of the bun and the piece of lettuce and tomato slice which was buried in the meat mountain.
Leaving the doorstops of dense beef and gammon, the densest of all the foodstuffs on this offering. Easy. Or, with a brain slowly switching itself off from over-stimulation and a distinctly unhappy set of internal organs in my midriff, perhaps not.
And it came just like that. No mas. White flag raised. Its over.
A distinct self-loathing bubbling – at an inability to finish or to even try it in the first place, who knows. Time to pay the bill and slink off.

The postscript to all this is I barely slept that evening due to meat sweats, didn’t eat for around 36 hours after the effort and my colon was more packed than a London-bound train at 8am. It probably took a couple of hours off my life expectancy too so, at the very least, the whole experience is not a one-night only kind of deal.

The strange survival of the working man's club

Even of my generation, working men’s clubs conjure up images of pipe smoke-filled rooms, warm real ale, meat raffles, bearded men with more empties in front of them than teeth in their mouths, stained billiard tables and more wonderfully English things like these.
The kind of thing which now of course has to be seen as an anachronism – if there’s no such thing as a working class anymore, why would such an entity need their own club?
Recently, I’ve been going to a working man’s club - curiously retained in quite a leafy, well-to-do village - to spend a couple of hours getting progressively more pissed off at not being able to play snooker well (the loss of dedicated snooker clubs is less mourned than the decline of much else in this country. Now so many of the (chain-owned) remaining clubs rely on booze shifted during the showings of early hours of the morning boxing title fights to bring in the revenue; it makes it feel more like a last destination of the night bar than a snooker club).
Digression over. To return to my tracks, the working man’s club has been an interesting experience.
There is still some remnants of that old school vibe; the opportunity to go home victoriously clutching some sausages or a chicken carcass which by the time you leave have been sat at room temperature for a while, pints sold for less than £3 a pop, snooker cues which pre-date Windows’ 95, the only food being pork scratchings and a few regulars whose speaking voice is completely unintelligible (there was one bloke the other night who it took four “Sorry, what?”s to realise he was saying their was an overhead light for the pool table).
But, when all is said and done, it’s more or less a pub; empty on a Wednesday night but full on a Friday, a limited selection of quality-limited drinks (Fosters and Strongbow staples), the fruity sucking down cash in the corner and worn, worn carpets.
However, unlike your average underfunded, identikit pub, it’s friendly. The volume on the TV (unusually showing VH1 or some such rather than Sky Sports News) is down low, people talk to each other across tables and at the bar, there’s no scary looking fuckers who look like they’d rabbit punch you for glancing at their tattooed faces. The young people are tolerated, knowing the older clientele are the chiefs around these parts. Bar staff interact. The books and board games littered about the place are meant to be there, not a concession to artificial character or an ironic nod.
And when a place and its people are full of character, you don’t mind the rough edges or being charged a quid for guest entry (hell, when they forget to charge you, you give them the pound as you feel like you’re cheating someone as opposed to a business).
It’s fantastic.

Would public apathy be a good thing for the England football team?

There was a lot of talk on Five Live last night about whether there is broadening sense of apathy toward the England football team from the general public.

While Wembley crowd numbers remain ridiculously strong, viewing figures for the Slovenia game were less than half of that for the Great British Bake Off the evening after, and it was was the same story with the figures for the Malta match versus The X Factor.

Paired with this was anecdotal evidence from texters to the radio show, saying they didn’t watch the Slovenia game, their little sons didn’t want to watch the game or ask for the score and so on. Thinking about it, I had the first half on while I was doing other things around the house, turned it off to read instead(!) and then watched the last quarter of an hour.

All of this seems to add up to a lower level of public interest. Putting this in to context though, about 5m people still watched the Slovenia game which is roughly a tenth of England’s population. And I can always recall there being a level of disconnect between England’s fans and its football team in the aftermath of disappointing major championship exits.

But this feels on another level – losing to Iceland rather than a Portugal or Germany at a major championship, the Sam Allardyce fiasco and seemingly never-ending listless performances all contributing.

Ignorant booing and social media abuse of Wayne Rooney aside, the passion seems dimmed.

However, is this truly a bad thing?

Many reasons have been put forward for England’s underachievement at international level – indulged players, lack of English footballers in the Premier League, those English players in the Premier League being made to look good by their foreign counterparts, managers aren’t good enough, tactically inflexible, youth systems aren’t producing and so on and on and on and on.

Another theory is the amount of pressure and expectation on England to not only win but also win playing in an attractive manner, especially against ‘smaller’ footballing nations. This comes from both the media and the public, especially with the all-consuming power of social media, with where it all starts rather unclear (though I suspect it is more social media-led now).

It appears to be self-perpetuating as the longer England go without winning a major tournament, the greater the burden – 30 years of hurt has quickly become 50. Nowhere could this been seen more than that night in Nice when English players seemed incapable of passing the ball 10 yards without it winding up at the feet of an Icelander.

But what if continued and enhanced public apathy towards the England national football team gradually reduces the pressure to the extent players do not wilt when wearing the England shirt? What if they feel unshackled and can play their natural games?

There was an element of this in the Euro 2016 qualifying campaign under Roy Hodgson where wins were picked like ripe fruit and no-one really had much expectation for the most part (partly due to Hodgson playing everything down).

Right up until the moment England won 3-2 away in Germany and the weight of expectation returned.

 But maybe, just maybe, extreme levels of apathy might just be crazy enough to work.

Conflicted over Lewis

I’m conflicted about Lewis Hamilton and I’m sure that fact is keeping him up at night.
Hamilton has been the most exciting out-and-out racer in Formula One over the past decade or so, probably the best wheel-to-wheel racer in that time and comfortably is in the best three drivers currently featuring.
All in all, three world championships speaks for itself.
Beyond that, he is testament to the fact hard work can pull oneself out from a non-privileged background and (tax matters notwithstanding), I absolutely cannot begrudge a self-made man living his life.
He also transcends his sport by his association with a plethora of celebrities which has in turn opened up the sport to different markets. The latter is a foul word but we all know what kind of world we live in. People criticise him for this but a dash of the rich and famous has always been associated with Formula One – its what rich and famous is that has changed, not the sport.
It is not far from an exaggeration to say the sport needs Hamilton more than he needs it, certainly with regard to their respective futures.
But, on the flip side, he’s SO ANNOYING. I refer to a piece on The Telegraph website posted last year and his interview on Channel 4 on Sunday pre-race.
The telling people about all the parties he goes to but one being a works do and another a family get-together and the toe-curling cringe of the “guess how many hours sleep I get” line (more than notorious, riotous party animal Margaret Thatcher was said to get, it turns out).
With the incessant need to tell everyone about how much fun he is having – craving recognition - Hamilton might well be the first person to speak like an Instagram posts.
He’s literally like the guy at uni who has discovered alcohol after moving away from the stern family home and wants everyone to know how drunk he is.
Sure selling the exciting (and indeed not exciting) aspect of one’s life is how a lot of people earn a living these days but those people are usually the ‘famous for being famous’ sort unlike the talented Hamilton.
But the complexity of this comes in that the very fact he does party, mingle with celebrity friends, tries his hand at music, films himself doing extreme sports and so on makes him so different from everyone else on the F1 grid. They may well do similar, but we don’t know about it as it everything is so media-managed where for whatever reason Hamilton is comfortable flaunting it.
In turn, why does it have to be celebrity brashness that makes someone appreciated as different? Why not celebrate Max Verstappen’s balls-out precociousness, Sebastian Vettel’s nuanced, very German take on British humour and Kimi Raikkonen’s refusal to give a shit about anything? These aren’t the most interesting things in the world but again, this goes back to the media-management issue. When Raikkonen lived in strip clubs (as that’s how it felt given how much coverage was dedicated to it), he was feted as the maverick king of F1, the crown Hamilton now holds.
And someone in there features that very British thing to be mistrustful of success by one of our own, particularly when we do not feel that success has been earned by anything other than 24/7 dedication to the craft and hard work.
Usually when writing things down, you get a feeling for what side of the fence you ultimately fall on. After putting this down, I still feel divided over Lewis Hamilton. But I doubt I’m alone.

Being cultural and seeing a proper play at a West End theatre

As the kind of person who’s only visits to the theatre up until the age of 19 were for pantomimes and snooker matches, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on and review plays. Well, uniquely placed anyway. Uniquely meaning poorly, in this context.
So, being poorly placed to comment on and review plays, I nonetheless proudly present to you some words after I saw the Sir Kenneth Branagh production of Romeo & Juliet at the Garrick Theatre on Monday last week.
Even a local authority-run school alumni such as myself knows not just the plot but also the ins and outs of the themes of Rome & Juliet (thank ingyou GCSE English), so that saves us an awful lot of time here.
What I want to talk about is the language–the rhythmic, loping, bouncing language of Shakespeare which we all know but never appreciate. To go back to Year 10, reading Rome & Juliet off the page was a bore because not many 15-year-olds from Reading, generally speaking, have the ability to read 400-year-old soliloquies lyrically. Most struggle with reading Tweets.
In this production, the language of Shakespeare is so wonderfully retained but so perfectly boiled down to still challenge the listening audience to interpret the spoken word but also to ensure the production remains accessible to a wide ranging audience.
And the cast of this production is why there is a wider social spectrum in the audience. Or in the audience on Monday night anyway.
Richard Madden and Lily James play the star-crossed lovers and their TV back catalogue rakes in the younger audience.
Madden’s puppy-ish, devoted Romeo often dominates his swaggering teenager ego, not always a bad thing though as his lovestruck, brooding young man performance is strong but too much and it becomes mopey.
But James’ portrayal of Juliet is what keeps its all going – whether it be the champagne drunk on a balcony scene when she properly meets her Romeo, the on-the-cusp-of-orgasmic anticipation at seeing Romeo again after their secret marriage or the heart-rending dénouement, all are innocently lovely – wonderfully, recognisably teenager. Which is what this is all about of course, love and lust at a vulnerable time of our lives.
Elsewhere, Derek Jacobi’s Mercutio is wonderful – an unusual ‘fun, lecherous but non-threatening’ uncle approach to the role meant to be an age contemporary with Romeo which just works if not perfectly, then perfectly suited to the audience.
To go back to language, no-one does knob gags quite like Shakespeare and it is a joy the way Jacobi delivers them (and great when one works out the more complex knob gags. Complex knob gags indeed.)
However, as a result of this style, his death was sadly interpreted by some members of the audience as an exaggerated piece of physical comedy, beyond the moment he is stabbed and right up until the moment he is no longer speaking before the penny drops.
In a similar vein, Meera Syal’s Nurse was also a far more knowing, mischievously devious and encouraging confidante for Juliet than anticipated – playful but still deeply caring of her surrogate daughter.
All of this is set in a 1950s-style Venice filled with café culture, suits, sunglasses and a time equally as recognisable as male-dominated as the original play.
Without having much else to compare it to given limited  theatre experience, it would be foolish to sum up this play in any other way than to say I quite liked it so…yeah…see it if its your thing. Or don’t, if you don’t want to. Its your choice really. Unless tickets are sold out, in which case you have no choice. That’s how it goes, I suppose.