Theatre review: Starcrossed

Mercutio's most memorable scene in any given production of Romeo & Juliet is likely to be the showboating Queen Mab speech, but his most famous line is the "a plague o' both your houses" refrain of his dying speech. As I get older and look at Shakespeare plays in different ways, one of the things I find notable about the play is that this speech, largely directed at Romeo, isn't entirely fair: The historic feud between the Montagues and Capulets might be the root cause of Mercutio's death, but the immediate cause is his own recklessness. Romeo has actually defused a volatile situation before Mercutio riles the thuggish Tybalt again, leading to a duel and, eventually, both their deaths. Rachel Garnet's Starcrossed, a reimagining of Romeo & Juliet, works in part as a possible explanation of this plot hole around why a character unrelated to either side of the feud, who's been happy to play the class clown until then, suddenly stokes up the fire in one of its most dangerous participants.

Much like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead does for Hamlet, Starcrossed retells Romeo & Juliet from the perspective of two comparatively minor characters - in fact Mercutio and Tybalt are essentially only in the story to die for plot purposes. Unlike in Stoppard's play, the new leads aren't oblivious to the main plot because they're too peripheral to grasp its significance, but because they've got their own grand secret tragedy to act out.

So Mercutio (Connor Delves) is with Romeo up until the famous balcony scene, and ends up helping him escape: Juliet's cousin and the Capulets' enforcer, Tybalt (Tommy Sim’aan) is roaming the garden, and Mercutio has to distract him. When all else fails he kisses him and runs off, leading to the reason they both get taken out of the story for a while as the kiss leads Tybalt to question his sexuality, and pursue his feelings for Mercutio. It's a very clever premise for queering up Romeo & Juliet, matching up Mercutio as the flamboyant one and Tybalt as the rough trade.

It comes with mixed results: Garnet's dialogue mixes the original with a few lifts from other Shakespeare work, as well as her own pastiche which is generally decent, although sometimes the grammar pulled me right out of it ("I wouldst"?) The least successful elements are probably those where it sticks most closely to the spirit of the original - namely the florid passages on love, spoken by characters who've just met and who, if we're honest, are basing all of this just on an instant physical attraction.

I wasn't really rooting for them as a couple, which I think is largely down to Mercutio: As Tybalt is the most lightly-sketched of the two characters in the original, Garnet has obviously felt free to give him the most new character development, much of which revolves around his deadbeat father (Gethin Alderman, who as The Player takes on all the other roles.) Mercutio on the other hand is very much an extension of Shakespeare's cynical joker, and Delves is giving us flippant one-liners long after I would have liked to have seen a bit of sincerity in both sides of the relationship if I was going to buy it.

Philip Wilson's production is also a bit uncertain in tone - The Player is largely comic relief, and Alderman does very well to balance this with the requirement to step into more dramatic scenes with the other two actors. But writer and director sometimes choose odd moments to step up the comedy - having Alderman only play male characters, only to play a female one very near the end, is to go for pretty broad laughs just when the tension should be stepping up. And for a story we assume will follow the original and build to a tragic ending, this tension never really materialises enough.

So a show that falls a bit flat does detract from a lot of positives - I do like a story that deconstructs and tries to patch up Shakespearean plot holes* and Starcrossed makes sense of Mercutio (apparently) discovering a bloodlust out of nowhere. Staging it in Wilton's Music Hall, with Ruari Murchison's designs keeping things Elizabethan, gives it Garnet's intended feel of a tribute to the unknown LGBTQ+ stories of the past, and she and Sim'aan have created in Tybalt a character faced with making a very modern decision, in a context where he might never have even encountered it as a possibility before. A bit more energy and acknowledgement of the high stakes might have tipped this into something truly memorable, but as it stands there are still interesting elements.

Starcrossed by Rachel Garnet is booking until the 25th of June at Wilton's Music Hall.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith.

*even if it does create a couple of its own: As a character beat, I can understand why Garnet has Capulet make Tybalt his heir, as it gives a contrast between what he's always wanted and what he wants now. But it comes just after Juliet's marriage to Paris has been agreed, and even if the inheritance wasn't explicitly part of the dowry it would have been implicit that marrying into a family with no other heirs would make Paris next in line, so it just looks like Capulet's started his relationship with his prospective son-in-law with a slap in the face.