Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers are given a grand Elizabethan setting in Tamara Harvey’s Theatre of Memory production – but not one that always serves them especially well. A long, narrow room of carved dark wood, Middle Temple Hall is an echoey and vaguely oppressive space whose dimensions sometimes lead to awkward moments of staging, a diffusion of energy and focus and occasional inaudibility.

The designer Jenny Tiramani brightens proceedings with dazzling white costumes that playfully suggest both the period and the modern. Knee-breeches are worn with baseball boots; wasp-waisted jackets and jauntily angled hats – reminiscent of the garb Gloriana might have worn to go hunting – are teamed with pencil skirts and vertiginous heels. Snowy denim and leather are scattered with glittering bling.

Some of the performances match that sparkle; others are less lustrous. Juliet Rylance is an enormously appealing Juliet, evidently and effortlessly well-born, with mischief in her shining eyes. With her husky tones and air of self-possession she’s perhaps a little too mature; but with Santiago Cabrera’s Romeo she shows all the lusty, reckless abandon of a teenager smitten by first love.

The object of her affections is rather less interesting. Cabrera – who plays the clairvoyant junkie artist Isaac Mendez in the TV series Heroes – has dark and dashing looks, but he never lends enough weight to either Romeo’s explosion of passion, nor his tragic despair.

The play’s darkening mood is not helped by Harvey’s decision to perform it with the house lights up throughout. This, rather than encouraging a sense of shared experience between audience and actor, is in practice distancing, the mundane rows of seated spectators a distraction from the onstage action. There’s some boisterous song and dance, choreographed by Ann Yee, and impressive sword fighting in which the acclaimed dancer Will Kemp, as an effervescent if somewhat insubstantial Mercutio, excels.

And it’s often in the play’s less celebrated scenes that Harvey’s production comes into its own. The confrontation between Ann Mitchell’s curvily formidable Nurse and Romeo and his saucy cohorts is priceless; they teasing her with a combination of charm and cheek, she quelling their antics with a gimlet eye and walloping her hapless servant with her elegant clutchbag. And Nicolas Tennant is an unusually memorable Friar Laurence, sharp of eye and of tongue, compassionate but markedly devoid of any inclination to suffer fools. This is a mixed bag of a production; but one that decidedly holds a few gems.

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