Richard III (1995), was set in 1930s Britain and Twelfth Night, made in the same year as Luhrmann’s film, was set in Victorian times. As You Like It (1992) was performed in an industrial wasteland. Shakespeare adaptations set in different time periods had happened before Lurhmann. To me, the films are in different stratospheres in their approach to the material and thus totally incomparable. Lurhmann, in contrast, plays fast and loose with every element of his production. While Zeffirelli’s film is visually sumptuous, it still plays it safe with the material, with few changes in tone or historical period. Many critics compared the film to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet. In every way Lurhmann made this film scream “gangsta”. Even the “and” in the title was replaced with a + sign.

The soundtrack dispenses with classical strings, replaced by 90s bands such as Radiohead and Garbage. Swords are replaced with Uzis and pistols.

Tattoos, gold chains, loud Hawaiian shirts, leather vests, and silver teeth adorn them. The Capulet and Montague patriarchs do business in adjacent skyscrapers while the younger generation wage a vicious war on the streets. Instead of Verona, Italy, we are on Verona Beach, California. Lurhmann was not presenting us with a reinterpretation of the stage play, but a complete re-imagining of its universe. While some praised the film as “clever and well-executed” and “genuinely inventive”, others labelled it “a very bad idea” and “a monumental disaster”. It is 25 years since Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann released his gloriously spectacular version of Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as the doomed lovers.

Romeo and juliet 1968 script