In the fair town of Splott, not far from the sprawling Cardiff steelworks, where we lay our scene, two teenagers meet cute in a crowded cafeteria. She’s a chirpy high school kid with a big brain who dreams of going to Cambridge to study physics. He’s a dropout and a single father who lives with his alcoholic mum in a shabby bedsit. The brainy kid offers to babysit, and he willingly accepts. Before long, they’re stroking hands and kissing by the book.

This is Welsh playwright Gary Owen’s grease-stained urban adaptation of Shakespeare’s most excellent and lamentable tragedy. True to its source, it depicts the chaos caused by a grand passion that seems to strike its helpless victims like a thunderbolt. It is also a class-conscious reflection on the difficulties of sustaining romantic commitments in a depressed situation where life is a constant struggle. Owen paints a grim vision of life in the terraced houses of Cardiff that contrasts with the intensity of the central romance.