Spider-Man in Shakespeare will have you crawling up the walls

The bad news is that Lloyd has taken precisely the same approach to Shakespeare’s tale of star-cross’d lovers as he took to his revival of Sunset Boulevard and it just doesn’t really work at all. The formula has also got tiring.

There is no set to speak of, Holland’s arrival upon the stage is presaged by endless backstage footage of him making his way down corridors, and, while we all get that the big star is in the building, it is necessary too in a production of this kind of show at least some measure of respect for Shakespeare and indeed theatre itself.

Just about everything that I regard as theatrical – actors given a chance to act, attractive costumes, an appealing set, some poetry to the words, an overall approach that draws the punters in – Lloyd has remorselessly cut back like an over-enthusiastic gardener.

We are left looking at a group of casually dressed individuals performing against what looks like the back of a public lavatory and the musical accompaniment – to the extent it can be described as musical – sounds like a drunken heavyweight wrestler trying to escape the pots and pans department of John Lewis very late at night.

Often the actors on the stage are dwarfed by a gigantic cinema screen showing them acting upon the stage and the message – maybe this is the ultimately theatrical heresy in this production – is don’t bother looking at them, just look at the screen.

Whatever else might be said about all of this, it doesn’t conjure up any feelings of romance. Shakespeare is credited in the programme as “the playwright” but the reality is that he’s been clumsily rewritten and truncated. That takes some arrogance.

Lloyd has done Holland no favours at all, but, for all that, he comes out of it looking good. I hope the experience won’t put him off going on stage again before too long – he is a good actor with a natural stage presence.