The concept of single-sex Shakespeare has been thoroughly explored in recent years, from the “original practices” productions at the Globe under its former artistic director Mark Rylance to the work of Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller company. So there’s nothing terribly startling, in essence, about this adaptation by the American Joe Calarco which relocates the story of the star-crossed lovers to a Roman Catholic boys’ boarding school in the 1950s.

First seen in the UK in 2003 in Calarco’s own production, it caused a stir with its mining of burgeoning sexuality and homoeroticism in the repressed atmosphere of an educational establishment hidebound by class, tradition and religion. In Alastair Whatley’s revival for the touring company Original Theatre, however, the conceit feels strained – due in part to clumsy staging and some noisily self-indulgent acting.

In an overlong introductory section, the rigid routines of school life are implied. From offstage, we hear the Latin verb “to love” being robotically conjugated. Sonnets are given a dryas-dust classroom treatment; choruses of voices sing Jersualem. Eventually, four boys appear having, in an act of somewhat unlikely transgression, decided to meet in the chapel at night for an illicit impromptu performance of Romeo and Juliet.

At first they giggle over the wordplay – “‘Draw thy tool’ ” sniggers one – and the feuding Montagues and Capulets offer tempting opportunities for roughhousing. But undercurrents of allegiance and secret longing quickly emerge. The boy playing Mercutio has an enormous crush on Romeo and passion flowers for real between the romantic hero and his play-acting Juliet, to the disgust of the homophobic bully Tybalt.

All this may have been interesting had Whatley handled it with more finesse. But his production has high volume without intensity. Verse is often drowned out by the loud repositioning of wooden pews on the theatre’s unforgiving concrete floors, or mangled by a young cast which struggles with its rhythms and emphases. The boys never achieve emotional transcendence through Shakespeare’s poetry; there’s no lyricism here, no musicality or delicacy, just a lot of shouting.

Physically, too, the production lacks discipline; the actors fling one another about with adolescent vigour but there’s no very convincing sign of the tremulous tenderness that should underlie the masculine bravado. Chrisopher Hogben has the right intensity as a floppy-haired Romeo and all four actors work hard. But this slow, garbled interpretation does little to lend a familiar play any fresh accessibility.

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