Fantastic Mr Fox saves the show with heroic, beguiling performance as a stand-in Romeo
Romeo and Juliet Garrick
It has been a year of high drama in the world of theatrical understudies. We had Sheridan Smith pulling out of Funny Girl at short notice – and the spotlight falling on Natasha J Barnes. Glenn Close was hospitalised by a chest-infection during the run at the ENO of Sunset Boulevard, giving Ria Jones a moment to shine.
And now, at the Garrick’s Romeo and Juliet, incredibly, the lightning of bad luck has struck twice in the same place, with first Richard Madden, the lead, injuring his ankle while out running and then his replacement Tom Hanson also hobbled by leg trouble last week. Madden is making a recovery and will return to the show for some of these final performances, but in the meantime who to call on?
“Live theatre can present you with a curve-ball, but we really didn’t see this one coming,” director Kenneth Branagh affably confessed to the audience at the start of the Wednesday matinee, introducing “the hugely talented Freddie Fox” as the have-a-go hero: just a few days of rehearsal and, zounds, there he is, venturing palm to palm with Lily James’s Juliet, whose performance has been ripening for more than two months. It’s worth noting that Fox was a winning Romeo in Sheffield last autumn but, even so, lines can quickly be forgotten and a whole new set of moves has had to be picked up on the fly, including a sword-fight.
Let’s hear it for the fantastic Mr Fox, whose blond hair may present him as the odd one out in the Italian world that Branagh and co-director Rob Ashford conjure but who integrates seamlessly. You wouldn’t know that here is a fresh-faced interloper to the production. Fox has an educated tone and yet nothing sounds mannered. There’s a physical grace to his movements, but the verse-speaking is beguilingly fleet of foot too.
What might sound like artful rhetoric when he describes the envy he feels at the flies that remain free to “seize on the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand…” has the force of despairing rage – and he even makes silent looks of love and later agony (at news of Juliet’s death) speak volumes. I wish Madden a quick recovery but his stand-in is, I hate to say it, just what the doctor ordered.