KXT on Broadway, May 13
7.5/10
No, that’s not a typo in the title: this is Welsh playwright Gary Owen’s contemporary take on star-crossed lovers, now set in Cardiff rather than Verona. His Romeo – called Romy (rhymes with “foamy”) – and Julie also have problematic parents, but there’s no feud. What thwarts this pair’s love is Julie’s having a chance to study physics at Cambridge, while Romy, well, he’s illiterate and a single dad courtesy of the last teen he got pregnant.
Claudia Barrie’s Mad March Hare production is exceptionally well cast and performed, and she’s found two new-generation gems to play the leads. Estelle Davis is luminous in portraying everything from Julie’s incisive intelligence to her exquisite revulsion when drinking rough red. Alex Kirwan perfectly captures Romy’s boyish wonderment being fast-tracked into manhood by the ceaseless demands of his new baby, Niamh (pronounced “Neeve”).
Geita Goarin’s simple set on the traverse stage has a multipurpose rostrum, a daybed, and two “clotheslines”, on which hang what could be torn nappies or the shredded sheets of love (very occasionally obscuring one’s view).
Barrie, herself, plays Barb, Romy’s hard-nosed, hard-drinking mum, who’s done with child-raising, but while soiled nappies are entirely Romy’s business, the part of her heart that hasn’t been ransacked by booze is happy to share her two-room flat with her son and granddaughter.
Christopher Stollery, whom, coincidentally, I first encountered playing Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet some 33 years ago, is Julie’s gruff father, Col, who wouldn’t be averse to solving the Romy problem with his fists. Linda Nicholls-Gidley not only plays Kath, Julie’s step-mum, she’s also the accent and dialect coach, and has highly successfully landed all five actors on the same page of lilting Cardiff Welsh, with bouncy, dieresis-creating vowel extensions, whereby “school” becomes “sku-ell”.
Every character’s heart is laid bare, however much they want to swaddle it up like little Niamh’s body, and everyone’s likeable, however grossly flawed. “You be kind to my boy when you’ve had enough of him,” Barb tells Julie, and part of the play’s sophistication is the acknowledgement of different forms of intelligence, so Romy’s moral intelligence can match Julie’s IQ. He teaches her how to be a mother, and she begins to teach him to read.
But few people get their lives right, and then only with some wrenching decisions along the way, and you see the potential doom of Romy and Julie’s affair looming on the horizon some way out. As with his Iphigenia in Splott, however, Owen has another problem with his ending. In Iphigenia, he concluded by spelling out themes already expounded by the play. Here, he lets sinewy reality start to froth towards soapiness, which is only exacerbated by sound designer Josh Anderson giving us a swelling, Hollywood-style underscore in the final scene. This story, these characters and these compelling performances deserved better.
Until May 23.