HAVING watched elderly family and friends depart this Earth and noted my father’s struggle to cope with my mother’s advancing dementia, it was only a matter of time before Ben Power’s powerful take on Romeo and Juliet reduced me to tears.

This much-anticipated world premiere, and first RSC commission for Newcastle, presents the great lovers as a retired couple struggling with comic grace into old age before Juliet is diagnosed with terminal illness.

Forbes Masson and Kathryn Hunter play out this touching drama on a blue-boarded decking area, making the most of Jacques Collin’s superb video sequences of everything from seascapes to torrential rain, to butterflies which are displayed on stage-enveloping transparent screens.

There are lovely touches such as Masson’s cardigan being wrongly buttoned and Hunter climbing gracefully onto a chair before being unable to get down. Euthanasia, of course, becomes the couple’s preoccupation, with writer Power re-running parts of Shakespeare’s text as Romeo attempts to portray the lark as the nightingale to delay Juliet’s preparation for suicide at dawn.

Fortunately, Power, an associate director of Headlong Theatre, then adds an epilogue to die for.

As I left the Northern Stage venue, so entombed and unnoticed now behind Newcastle University’s latest building, my son said to me: “Everyone should see this. This is what they should run at 9pm on a Sunday rather than X Factor.”

Who am I to argue?

■ Until tonight. Box office: 0191-230-5151 northernstage.co.uk