Romeo is in a terrible sulk. Poor Juliet barely appears at all. US playwright Rachel Garnet has relegated Shakespeare’s famous lovers to the wings and re-spun Romeo and Juliet as a tragic gay romance between Tybalt and Mercutio. It’s a brave move, which leaves Garnet open to comparisons not only with Shakespeare but also Stoppard, who pulled off a similar trick in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Yet despite this heavyweight dramatic legacy there’s a wonderful sense of freedom about Starcrossed, which is very much its own play – thoughtful, surprising and original.
Director Philip Wilson and designer Ruari Murchison have created a timeless dramatic framework with a bare-bone set and streamlined period costumes. There’s a low-fi playfulness to the production. A constant stream of comic riffs and ad-libs creates a giddy sense of spontaneity and possibility and the uncanny feeling that maybe, just this once, Shakespeare’s tragedy might end differently.
Wilson cannily accentuates the distinctive talents of this impressive cast of three. The a cappella singing that ripples through the show is pitch perfect. Haruka Kuroda’s fight sequences are beautifully stylised yet also tingle with danger. Gethin Alderman – who plays all the roles besides Tybalt and Mercutio – manages to make the scene changes both slick and silly, with little more than a few perfectly timed winks, groans and grins.
Garnet borrows cleverly from a great range of Shakspeare’s plays and the quick-fire banter between Mercutio and Tybalt has hints of Beatrice and Benedick, Petruchio and Katherina. Connor Delves’s Mercutio is initially as light as air – the flighty foil to Tommy Sim’aan’s stiff and awkward Tybalt. As the romance flourishes, the two meet each other in the middle: Mercutio drops his performed insouciance and Tybalt moves more freely, loosened up and liberated by love.
The play only dips when the soliloquies lean too heavily on the original. It’s when Garnet writes most freely, with little more than a passing glance to the Bard, that she finds her own voice. “You are an ending,” says Tybalt to Mercutio. Hooked and invested, we pray – despite all we know to the contrary – that Tybalt is wrong.
At Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 25 June
