Josh O'Connor and Jessie Buckley dazzle in the paciest, raciest Romeo and Juliet in decades

As Prince Charles in The Crown, Josh O’Connor transfixingly suggested a brooding old head on youngish shoulders, in a way that commandingly banished dullness.

The same subtlety of that Golden Globe-winning performance is fully in evidence in his contribution to Simon Godwin’s ravishing, revelatory account of Romeo and Juliet. O’Connor proves he has the power to be a swoon-making heart-throb without losing his pensive intensity (albeit fans of The Crown may do double-takes during the early, recognisable flashes of bleak dolefulness, before a more varied quality of characterisation enters his portrayal).

At 30, the star is no spring chicken but he balances that edge of maturity with a scintillating, tender sensitivity. Matched for expressiveness by Jessie Buckley’s Juliet, the result is the paciest, raciest version of the play since Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film.

A production conceived pre-pandemic for a packed National Theatre has been ingeniously re-worked to make the most of the cultural Chernobyl that the NT has become, a deserted creative engine-room. The acting company are like interlopers into a chilly sepulchral realm. The film cameras watch the troupe file in, then observe from an empty Lyttleton auditorium as they’re swallowed behind the iron (safety) curtain.

Verona is conjured, minimally but beautifully, with whatever’s to hand (and the odd furnishing add-on) in the backstage world we never normally see, right down to the bowels of the building. What might have been a dutiful exercise of artistic salvage becomes an interpretative masterstroke: not just a love-letter to our flagship venue (and all who sail behind her) but an affirmation of the power of the imagination, and the way cinematography can get close to the beating heart of a theatrical experience.

Hybrid form matches Shakespearean content. What is love but something you can’t fake? At its core, it’s about stripping away artifice, to reach something honest, trusting, abandoned. By framing the action as a theatrical endeavour, Godwin makes us conscious of Buckley and O’Connor as actors, exchanging conspiratorial smiles when they sit as if at a first read-through, while Lucian Msamati intones the prologue.

Yet, as the action proceeds, that camaraderie bleeds into riveting sexual chemistry; the attraction appears to be happening for real, the suspension of disbelief carrying a fresh frisson of danger. Liberties have been taken – there are flash-forwards to what lies ahead, cross-cuts between habitually separate scenes. It’s as if something uncontrollable seizes the play and the players, creating a fertile mood of confusion and inexorable motion. Fly on the wall footage of the duo chasing about carefree as if in a covert bonding exercise becomes a lyrical expression of fleeting rapture.

O’Connor and co have spoken about the privations of the pandemic magnifying the sensuality of the tragedy, and what’s at stake. And that’s blazingly apparent. Taut script-edits (two hours traffic cut to a hurtling 90 minutes), and a suspenseful, period-leaping score of pulsing electronica and stirring, sweeping strings, bring the pressure-cooker scenario to combustion point.

Everything, even the smallest detail, feels pulse-quickening: spellbound looks exchanged at the masked Capulet ball, whispered asides, the verse dripped into each other’s ears, fingers clasping for the first time. Buckley is all questing intelligence, torn between gaiety and foreboding, speaking her lines straight into O’Connor’s face (oh, Covid-heedless bliss) in the balcony scene as if trying to merge with him. The nuptial scene, the pair surrounded by a constellation of candles, is achingly romantic, the two nuzzling in a combination of spiritual union and unabashed tactility. They undress and caress with an impatience and ardour that yells youth escaping lockdown without saying a word.

There are interesting directorial strokes at every turn of this 360 degree marvel. Godwin suggests an unbridled gay love between Fisayo Akinade’s Mercutio and Shubham Saraf’s Benvolio, counterpointing the bouts of visceral, macho street-fighting and knife aggro; and he gives Capulet’s denunciation of his daughter to Lady C (Tamsin Greig, terrifying in her ice-cold matriarchal rejection). The performances are high-definition across the board, making you yearn to watch it in a cinema, perhaps at the NT, which must persist with this bold experiment. On the strength of this showing, the Lyttelton could easily pass for Elsinore and O’Connor would clearly make a sublime Prince of Denmark.

Romeo & Juliet will be repeated on Sky Arts on Easter Monday 5 April at 9.30pm and Thursday 8 April at 10pm.