With an all-male cast of six, and the two hours’ traffic of our in-the-round and in-your-face stage reduced to sixty testosterone-charged minutes, Curious Pheasant theatre company’s successful re-staging of their sold-out run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe proves that the world’s greatest love story has legs (pun intended) – regardless of the gender of the star-crossed lovers and the make-up of their mutinous households, which in this instance are rival rugby teams, the Caps and the Monties, who in a haka-like opening establish the hate, hostility and homoeroticism which leads to Mercutio’s (Alex Bird’s) dying cry: “A plague on both your houses!”

Blokey banter is the order of the day as back-slapping and towel-whipping in adjacent changing rooms give way to a blood and thunder rugby match during which Troy Chessman’s on-the-rebound Romeo locks eyes with the “true beauty” of Bevan Thomson’s Juliet. With the seed of love-at-first-sight planted, a drunken bender of pub crawls and shots descends into a woozy morning after the night before during which Romeo (mid-selfie) spots Juliet (mid-slumber) lying in a pool of her own dreamy thoughts. Cue “But soft” and “Wherefore art”, both delivered with a playful tenderness which roots the action in the here and now.

Thereafter, the text is stripped like a groom on his stag do to focus solely on their short-lived love and tragic deaths – the latter given a homophobic twist through nothing more than a one-word slur and a hate-filled spit – culminating in the woeful epilogue delivered not by Prince but Adam Lay’s Benvolio, who along with Ronan Cullen as Tybalt and Sam Rowland as Juliet’s bear-like Nurse comprise the impressive sextet of competing rucks, whose names and numbers adorn their tight-fitting shirts.

Directed with an economy of movement by artistic director Becky Mills, the production well and truly lives up to the Hampshire-based company’s aim of exploring “traditional pieces of theatre in non traditional ways” with a view to “challenge the norms”. And though the butchering of the text diminishes the role of the parents and the threat of death, it nonetheless succeeds in capturing the joy of first and true love. Though, at times, the empty silence between line endings is as wide as the gulf between the warring households. The remedying of which would certainly quicken the pace and heighten the tension. That said, a sure-footed and sexy production – with legs!

Peter Callaghan
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