![]() ![]() Jacobi has fun camping it up in a white tuxedo but when he croons a cabaret song in the marketplace he lets self-indulgence get the better of artistic discipline. The casting of Derek Jacobi as the young hothead Mercutio seems half-genius and half-prank. All this takes a thumb-twiddling 20 minutes when the story needs to get moving. He retains the Queen Mab speech (an anthology piece that deserves to be ditched) and he follows this delay with a cabaret song to start the Capulet’s masked ball. Branagh’s textual choices create problems early on. To kill a rival and throw away your life for a 13-year-old you’ve met three times is the lunatic act of a dippy kid, not the choice of a sleek adult with a designer shirt and hand-made shoes. Romeo is played by Game of Thrones inmate Richard Madden, who seems a handsome enough specimen, but Branagh might have asked him to act with his soul rather than his forearms. Christopher Oram’s muted set has bland marble walls and tasteless squared-off pillars like a modern dictator’s palace on the Euphrates. The girls wear New Look frocks and the boys sport tight slacks and shirtsleeves. The stylish setting evokes Italy in the early 1950s. He musters a well-drilled, celebrity-ridden crew but they can’t quite get the rocket off the launchpad. Out come the stars in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet. ![]()
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