Cordelia Braithwaite and Paris Fitzpatrick in Romeo & Juliet. Photo: Johan Persson
This isn’t your father’s or grandfather’s Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet or their father’s or grandfather’s for a score of generations before that. This is Matthew Bourne’s 2019 version, and fans of Bourne and his New Adventures contemporary dance company know that the choreographer couldn’t be less interested in tinkering gently with a nice, new version.
Not on your nelly. Bourne apparently held off on tackling the beloved William Shakespeare play—with its complementary 20th-century Sergei Prokofiev score—until he saw a bold way into it. (Brett Morris muscularly conducts an 18-musician orchestra that doesn’t shy from frequent metallic sounds.)
Bourne has found what he was after. He’s cottoned to the idea that since it’s about young lovers (Juliet Capulet is 13 going on 14), he would cast it, for the most part, with young dancers and call the enthralling thing Romeo & Juliet, substituting the ampersand for “and” and thereby suggesting a modern sensibility. This isn’t the first time the titles been fiddled with in recent years.
Thinking about the perils of the young, Bourne pondered some more and decided he’d find a metaphor for the restricted Verona community where the Capulets and the Montagues would have nothing to do with each other and figuratively strait-jacketed their offspring.
What Bourne came up with after the head-scratching is a different Verona community set “sometime in the near future.” He’s kept the Bard’s Verona locale but, with those strait-jacketed town youngsters in mind, he’s literalized his vision and placed the oppressed adolescents in—wait for it—Verona Institution, a home for troubled youth.
Bourne’s regular set designer, Lez Brotherston, built a tiled environment with upstage entrances to (unseen) boys and girls wings, a central door to institutional offices, and matching staircases right and left leading to an upper runway. Well, there has to be something that can pass for a balcony, doesn’t there?
Within the imposing space, imposingly lighted by Bourne regular Paule Constable, Bourne tells a story of the famous star-cross’d lovers that deviates widely and broadly from Shakespeare’s sad tale. With Bourne’s regular music adapter Terry Davies playing as fast and loose with Prokofiev’s pulsating 1938 score as Bourne does with the familiar plot, this institutional captive Juliet (Cordelia Braithwaite) comes under the lustful eye of guard Tybalt (Dan Wright).
Constantly trying to evade the persistent guard, she has eyes for Romeo (Paris Fitzpatrick) when his Montague parents bring him to Verona Institute for some mental straightening out, which eventually leads to some literal strait-jacketing out. (Incidentally, no older Capulets make an appearance.)
The two fall for each other at a dance—this retained from the original, needless to say—and proceed into a welcome pas de deux. Smitten with each other, Romeo and Juliet do indulge in a series of insistent kisses as they dance. Their lip-locking most likely surpasses anything in any other dance anyone steeped in contemporary repertoire might name.
Bourne keeps other Romeo and Juliet elements while tweaking them this way and that. A Friar Lawrence figure figures in, but she’s Rev. Bernadette Laurence (Daisy May Kemp). The Rev tries administering to the Verona Institute inhabitants when she can but isn’t always effective. The menacing Tybalt ends badly but not as in the earlier synopsis. As a matter of creative fact, his demise stirs up guilt in Juliet that calls to mind Lady Macbeth’s mental descent.
What about a fiery Mercutio, a Shakespeare lover might ask? He’s here (Ben Brown). Bourne aficionados might suspect that, since Bourne just about always includes homosexuals in his works, Mercutio fits the bill. Those suspicions are borne (no pun intended) out. The ardent fellow succumbs as much to his sexual inclinations as to anything else.
The Bourne dancing is, as expected, high quality. Unsurprisingly, Bourne has found aptly specific movements for his corps. The opening sequence, during which the Verona Institute inmates initially appear, is a series of regimented steps and gestures indicating the habitual, numbing daily routines the young members carry out. The choreographer’s ensuing dances, often taking place with bodies rolling and roiling on the floor, reflect the unceasing anxiety the characters feel.
Red-headed Braithwaite dances, aptly, as if Juliet’s life was at constant risk. Fitzpatrick’s Romeo is hardly dashing at first, but he does behave like a teenager only beginning to understand his hormone-instigated feelings. Wright’s strapping Tybalt is non-stop terrifying, while Brown is an unflinching Mercutio.
There is a slight drawback, however. If Bourne is going to jettison Shakespeare’s blood-spilled plot about adolescent fatality, he’s obligated to replace it with imaginative alternative situations. Mostly in his 91-minute dance he’s successful, but about two thirds of the way through his revision, he briefly runs out of propulsive ideas. He inserts a section where the institute young’uns give in to stir-craziness that looks a good deal like other works during which a few too many cuckoos have flown over an institute nest. Perhaps he intends to represent young people confused by the world today. If so, that doesn’t register.
All the same, there is that balcony scene and those teenage kisses to lock on to just as this Romeo and Juliet lock on to each other’s eager lips.
Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet was streamed beginning March 26, 2021 and will remain online through April 4. Information and tickets: nycc.vhx.tv
