Writer: Rachel Garnet
Director: Philip Wilson
Like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Rachel Garnet’s new play tells the story of two minor Shakespearian characters. Usurping Romeo and Juliet as starcrossed lovers are that play’s Mercutio and Tybalt. With a cast of three, this queer love story played in the shadows of the Montague/ Capulet feud is genuinely affecting and looks right at home in Wilton’s Music Hall’s atmospheric auditorium.
Mercutio and Tybalt may take centre stage, but they can’t escape their fates, forever cemented in Shakespeare’s most famous of tragedies. For those who know what happens to Mercutio, on the side of the Monatgues, and Tybalt, a servant of Lord Capulet, there’s much to admire to see how they get there. And while Garnet makes up their love story, other parts of Romeo and Juliet remain pleasingly intact.
Usually depicted as sworn enemies, Tybalt and Mercutio begin the play with a swordfight. Tybalt is famous in Verona for his ruthlessness; Mercutio counters that with camp charm. But at their next meeting, the pivotal masked ball where Romeo lays eyes on Juliet for the first time, Mercutio kisses Tybalt as a diversionary tactic. Against his better will, Tybalt decides he likes it.
Written in iambic pentameter, Starcrossed feels suitably Shakespearian or, with its focus on same-sex desire, Marlovian. The rhythm is lucid and tight and while there are more than enough rhyming couplets to make an Elizabethan dramatist blush, the words are always clear and their meaning is never in doubt. The three actors recite their lines with ease.
As Tybalt, Tommy Sim’aan is utterly convincing as the hard man who mellows with a kiss. Stuck in a heteronormative world, there is pressure on Tybalt to marry and have kids, to have a legacy to give the future, but with his new lover he finds that he is becoming more interested in the present. Sim’aan’s Tybalt enters this new world with a mixture of awe and fear.
Connor Delves’s Mercutio is more at home in this hedonistic sphere where the present is more important than any tomorrow, and perhaps it’s this daring attitude to life that attracts Tybalt to his rival. Mercutio also mellows once their love affair begins; his camp and cheeky mannerisms soften, and he is soon enthralled with Tybalt. Within his performance, Delves manages to foreshadow Mercutio’s fate, and when Mercutio dreams of a future that he doesn’t believe in, Delves undercuts these hopes with a gentle melancholy.
All the other parts – Romeo, Paris, Lord Capulet, the Friar – are played by Gethin Alderman, and he is often very funny in these roles, but there are too many of these humorous scenes and they serve only to make the play longer rather than help move the story along . For instance, the scene where Alderman plays Juliet only seems to be there so the audience can laugh at his newest accent and change of clothes, and as the showdown between Tybalt and Mercutio beckons, these comical sections threaten to offset the tragedy that is to come.
But it all looks sumptuous on Ruari Murchison’s wooden set, which looks like it belongs in Wilton’s Music Hall, and Haruka Kuroda has done well as both fight and intimacy director, and she provides a sensitivity to the kisses and the swordfights alike. The stars have certainly aligned for this show.
Runs until 25 June 2022
