“One of our first tasks, in doing Romeo and Juliet, is to scrape away the information which is actually received from other versions of the story. ”

Bartlett questions the perceived similarities and moral basis of West Side Story, Prokofiev’s ballet and Zeffirelli’s movie, arguing that “those versions of Romeo and Juliet bear as much relation to Shakespeare’s play as the play does to his own narrative sources. What I mean is that they are complete reinventions from the material.”

Bartlett has a compelling agenda: he describes how most audiences of Romeo and Juliet come with a plethora of distorted impressions and preconceptions, and he is determined to subvert our expectations in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. He begins by scrutinising the first line of the play: “Two households, both alike in dignity”.

“The metrical stress of the line is actually on the word alike. This is not West Side Story, in which two families are culturally opposed and have different values, especially with regard to sexual behaviour. This is a play set in a city where every member of the population is a member of the Catholic Church and where everyone agrees on one thing, which is that Juliet is precisely the right age to be married. Shakespeare specifies, very dramatically, that Juliet is the sole heir of one of the leading houses of the city and is the prize of Verona’s marriage market.”

According to Bartlett another “extraordinary misconception” that has coloured audiences’ understanding of the play is the idea that the Nurse is stupid. “I would defy anyone to argue that the Nurse is more stupid than Lord Capulet, or the Friar, or Count Paris. What does stupid mean in this case? The other misconception is that she is an old bag. There is an extraordinary footnote in the PenguinRSC edition of the play, where it says as a matter of academic fact that we are to assume the Nurse was 55 years old. Well, if she had a daughter who was the same age as Juliet, and we are told very precisely that Juliet was 13 years and 11 and a half months old, that means that the Nurse, as an Elizabethan woman, gave birth to her daughter at the age of 42. Elizabethan women did not bear children at 42. Most women would have been dead by that age.

“The stage traditions of Lady Capulet as the dragon lady, the Nurse as the old bag and Juliet as the prepubescent innocent are not derived from the text of Shakespeare’s play. They are derived from stage traditions of 19 century opera and from 20 century ballet, film and musical comedy.”

Bartlett quite clearly wants the audience to question the moral and sexual values of Veronese society, contradictory values that are reflected in Lord Capulet’s adoration and, later, rejection of his only daughter, Juliet, for not agreeing to the arranged marriage. Bartlett also insists that Juliet’ s age should not lead us to characterise her as a weak and defenceless girl. He asks the pertinent question: “What makes a young woman defy, with one decision, the rules of Verona and consequently take control of her own life? Her decision to choose her own marriage partner means that the entire culture of the city - the Church, the family and the street - is torn in half.”

Although Bartlett’s dramatic focus is undoubtedly the unintentional chaos created by Juliet’s decision to take Romeo for her husband, I challenged him on what room was left for a school audience to discuss how characters like the Nurse and Friar Lawrence might bear some responsibility for the eventual deaths of the two lovers? Could the motives and actions of these “lesser” characters be legitimately scrutinised when Juliet’s controversial choice of partner is so central to the drama? “I think it is a very valuable exercise to blame each of the characters in turn. But then, you must follow that exercise through to its logical conclusion and ask more searching questions. Why did the Friar do that? Why did the Nurse decide to help Juliet? Remember the Nurse is a Catholic woman who lost her daughter. When the Nurse finds Juliet ‘dead’ in her bed, it’s the second time that this has happened to her. Fourteen years ago she found her daughter Susan dead in her bed. The Nurse says that God has taken away her own daughter and has given her a second, for whom she intends to fight in order to give Juliet the life that Susan never had. It’s these hidden incidents of the play that we are trying to dramatise.”

I suggested to Bartlett that some may say he had a feminist axe to grind. He didn’t completely reject this suggestion. However, he argued that his understanding of Romeo and Juliet derives from the very fact that today women play characters that would, in Shakespeare’s time, have been played by boys. In Bartlett’s view this inevitably forces us to raise important questions about 16th century society. He is confident that his exploration of Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy caused by a young woman’s rejection of “man-made” rules, won’t cloud or obscure some of the other great themes in the play. Simple, but effective, visual statements such as the wearing of crosses by all characters help to convey an Elizabethan sense of destiny. Juliet’s bed doubles as her tomb, expressing the tragedy’s inextricable link between love and death. Bartlett has laid down a challenge to all students of Shakespeare. For him, “a happy audience always argues on the way out of the theatre”.

Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, until March 11. Tickets from Pounds 5.00. Box office O81 741 2311. West Yorkshire Playhouse March 18 - April 29. Box office: 01532 442141.