Earlier this evening I looked at the news and discovered
John McEnery had died. I have been feeling slightly stricken ever since. It is not quite true that I only ever saw him in one role, but that one was important to me.
I was shown Zeffirelli's
Romeo and Juliet (1968) when I was fourteen. We had just read the play in English class; I think it was spring. We had one of those TVs you could wheel in and out of classrooms and the teacher had a videocassette of the film and I have some memory that she dutifully tried to fast-forward the teenage nudity and instead started the scene right on Leonard Whiting's buttocks, but I remember the class evincing more awkwardness than she did. Anyway, in an age before prolifically accessible internet porn, Olivia Hussey's casually glimpsed breasts got an even louder reaction. That wasn't what struck or stayed with me. Everyone around me was falling in and out of love or lust or limerence as fast as Romeo from Rosaline to Juliet, but I wasn't—I didn't feel that feverish doomed intensity about anyone in person or music videos or magazines, I didn't recognize my adolescence in either of those dark, glowing faces, sumptuously photographed. I took away from it the heat and dust and sun of its syncretized Verona, the plangent theme of
a rose will bloom, and McEnery's Mercutio. He wasn't beautiful like the leads or leonine young Michael York; he was tall and straw-haired with a sharp, close-set face and I loved him, raucous and restless, the life of Verona's party and the specter at its feast, shivering on the edge of real breakdown in his fancy of Queen Mab. Romeo grips him and calms him, brow to brow; will pull him close in the same gesture after the fatal swordfight, not yet comprehending—like the rest of the crowd, hooting and cheering the latest tomfoolery on—that his always-joking friend is dying for real.
I was hurt under your arm. He was supposed to be untouchable, the world-weary live wire, the kibitzer, not the tragic hero. He made a burlesque of his match with Tybalt and it killed him anyway, a better reminder than any smug showrunner's letter that no one in a city of feuds is safe. I thought he was so much older than I was, so much older than Benvolio and Romeo. He was twenty-five. It is funny to me now that I never linked him with Sayers' Wimsey, whom I would run into a year or two later, so easily drunk on words as to be seldom perfectly sober, but in 2001 when I discovered Greer Gilman's "Jack Daw's Pack," his was the abrasive, magnetizing voice I heard at once for the white-headed, black-clad character introduced as
a witty angry man, a bitter melancholy man. I did not blame Tanith Lee for importing him wholesale into her novel
Sung in Shadow (1983). I tried twice to write about Mercutio, once in college and once about ten years ago, and both times he came out looking like McEnery.
He did not make many movies, as the
Guardian obituary notes; I saw him excellently double-cast in the RSC's
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1982) and IMDb tells me he was in Christine Edzard's
Little Dorrit (1987), but I think that might be it. I kept meaning to see his
Bartleby (1970) and I suppose I have no excuse now. Really what I would like to do is rewatch the 1968
Romeo and Juliet, which is of course in a box somewhere. It was the first movie I ever owned on DVD. I suspect McEnery had not a little to do with that. In his very first scene, Mercutio's skull-masked, a memento mori on his way to the dance.
True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy. Roses bloom and fade for dreamers, jokers, too.
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