OVER the years, the distinctive hallmarks of Andrew Hilton’s impressive productions for his Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory company have emphasised the clarity of the Bard’s language and displayed a determination that each and every character should be far more than a dramatic cypher serving the plot.

Yet his handing over the reins temporarily to Polina Kalinina sees a cataclysmic change. Her production lets the dramatic poetry look after itself and concentrates on holding audience attention through its dynamic energy.

Apart from Oliver Hoare’s neurotically crazed Mercutio, it doesn’t even distinguish minor characters in this whirlwind of feral youthful violence.

True, Shakespeare’s tragedy of the young — trapped between adolescent emotions and the conventions imposed by their elders — carries plenty of aggressive chutzpah but the play’s balance between public strife and private passion is obscured by the frenzy of the action.

Kalinina sets her production in the 1960s, an age of student angst, but here there is no political context or idealistic aim to the gang brawls. 

It doesn’t seem to matter which side is which and a 1950s Mods and Rockers setting might have been more appropriate.

In the midst of all the mayhem, in which Jonathan Howell’s choreographed fights are frighteningly convincing, Piapa Essiedu as Romeo is powerfully infatuated with Daisy Whalley’s winning and almost childlike Juliet — the first I have seen who could almost be only 14. 

Yet their passion seems almost incidental to the surrounding action and lacks an erotic charge.

In a cast committed to driving the plot at full speed, only Paul Currier’s Friar makes us listen to what is being said and engage with the underlying feelings of love and hate or the manifestations ofyouthful despair and parental power. 

Emma Bailey’s set, a children’s blood-stained roundabout, provides rails for weapons and a rostrum for the bed and tomb scenes and effectively captures the thematic treatment of the play in promoting the whirling action. 

This production will engage young audiences but, for all its vitality and momentum, remains two- dimensional in its treatment of a much richer play than we have here.

Runs until April 14, then tours. Box office: tobaccofactory.com