Coming of age for doomed lovers

LONDON - But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is ... a pensioner.

It's all right, though, because in this version of Romeo and Juliet, which begins at Britain's oldest theatre this week, the star-cross'd lovers are in their eighties and living in a care home.

The Bristol Old Vic, in its first show after closing in 2007, is producing one of Shakespeare's best-known plays - but one in which the parents and children are transposed. Rather than the rivalry of Montague and Capulet, it is their children who block their marriage on social grounds: Juliet is a private patient while Romeo is in the home courtesy of the NHS.

The age switch was the brainwave of the theatre's artistic director Tom Morris.

- INDEPENDENT