Mabel – Gala Theatre, Durham

Writer: Madeleine Carter

Director: Vilma Kitula

When Mercutio dies in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, he uses the opportunity to make a pun: “ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” In Madeleine Carter’s Mabel, Mercutio’s death is the starting gun for a melancholic meander through his memories – he is a grave man indeed, and more of a romantic than he lets on in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. This poetic production provides a deeper look into the psychology of this Elizabethan party animal, taking him into a modern context, and showing the extreme effort needed to maintain his cool façade.

Carter plays Mercutio with real energy, and a desire to convey the chaos and the drama of this iconic character. Carter’s physicality embodies the drunken disorientation of Mercutio’s lifetime of revelry, and the unstable nature of his mercurial mind leads to sudden jumps and shouts (the ‘mercurial’ pun, your reviewer will acknowledge, is from Carter’s playful script); but what the play is most interested in is the man behind the mask.

This vulnerable side to Mercutio has been picked up on in many a performance of Romeo and Juliet, but why the character is so volatile and cynical is the subject of Mabel. Here, Carter shows him lurching through a tragic love story, and she plays the resulting somber moments with compelling vulnerability. In fact, Mercutio finds room to desire two star-crossed lovers over the course of the play; one of whom, Romeo, rebuffs him – and the other, the titular Mabel, is unable to bear his child. The former is a welcome embrace of the queer interpretation of Mercutio, most notably performed by Harold Perrineau in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo and Juliet film, and this rejected love becomes tinder to the final fiery words Mercutio has for Romeo when he dies.

The poetic voice of the script elevates the emotional stakes of these more tender moments. Throughout, Carter’s script is a bold, often abstract, and frequently surreal, piece of writing, which lends itself to a dynamic performance. Director Vilma Kitula plays Romeo, puppeteers a beautifully crafted dog, and plays Mabel herself. This latter role is subtle, largely silent, and intriguingly understated; a dramatic contrast to the mad-blooded Mercutio. The script is saturated with well-drawn images, brief poetic descriptions that conjure a whole scene with a few words.

This also applies to the characters. Animals abound: Mercutio describes Juliet as being like a fish, gaping at everything as if she’s just seeing it for the first time, which is a humorous turn on the (notoriously young) character; Benvolio becomes an avid collector of animals, leading to a strange moment of accidental rabbit murder; and the play’s final tragedy is set in motion with the unfortunate coincidence of a cat and a pickup truck. This last example is perhaps the silliest addition, effective at showing the pettiness of the squabbles between the Montagues and Capulets, but ultimately a little too bizarre to give the final tragedies the necessary heft. A very symbolic dog appears at moments, but it is perhaps just symbolic enough (it is mentioned only fleetingly in the script) as to seem out of place.

All in all, this is an interesting, subversive take on a well-known character. Mercutio, the life of the party, here bites his cheeks to cope with anxiety; this character so wise and witty on the themes of love and desire can’t quite get it up when his own moment comes; the king of understatement, who makes a pun as he dies, here speaks as a romantic poet, perhaps prone to overstating the drama of his own life at times.

But it would benefit from unfolding these subversions over time: the fact that Mercutio is melancholy right from the start means it is hard to believe him when he tells us he’s the life of the party; and the disorienting nature of the plot, though clearly a product of Mercutio’s dying confusion, makes it hard to really connect with, as it is an effort sometimes simply to tell what is happening in a scene, given the poetic symbolism of the script. Still, for those who studied Romeo and Juliet at school, or Shakespeare fans curious about this iconic character, Mabel offers plenty to ponder.

Runs until 2 August 2026