Matthew Bourne's Romeo + Juliet Festival Theatre Edinburgh September 2023 Review
Matthew Bourne’s Romeo + Juliet is at the Festival Theatre Edinburgh this week (Tue 19 to Sat 23 Sept) and, as always, the loyal fans of anything that Mathew Bourne choreographs, directs and re-interprets through his unique approach to story-telling through dance, movement and music were out tonight filling the theatre.
I have to admit to counting myself as one of those fans and, having reviewed many of his productions over the years, I never tire of how Matthew Bourne always manages to find a completely different angle to tell an often well-known story from and in doing so he often unsettles our deep rooted perceptions of what that story is really about and who its principal characters really are, or really could be.
This production of Romeo + Juliet is however the one that is pushing my limits of how far I want not only one of the most famous stories in the world re-told but how I want Prokofiev’s music, one of the most famous musical scores ever written for ballet, used in a completely different setting.
I am not sure why I have been caught off-guard by this work (which premiered in 2019) as Shakespeare’s story of first love and two tragic young lovers has been re-told, re-invented endlessly in films, television, ballet, theatre, opera, and many other formats. It is a universal story that countless millions of people across their world relate to in their own special way. Likewise, there are different arrangements of Prokofiev’s music for the ballet out there, and in its first performance this ballet even gave this story a new happy ending, one which audiences did not like at all. Even if you are not familiar with the story, the chances are that you will at least know the names of Romeo and Juliet as they are so often used to refer to any two young people in love.
In Matthew Bourne’s new story we are no longer in Verona itself but the Verona Institute, a deliberately vague place that for some reason is where young people are sent to. Is this some sort of prison, a psychiatric hospital, a correctional facility, some sort of social experiment, or a bit of all of these things? We are never told the answer to this question but, whatever it is, Verona is not a place where anyone wants to go of their own free will as it is a brutal place where violence is part of everyday life. Here, in this bleak place we find Juliet who is being sexually abused by one of the guards, and violence between inmates is a part of every-day life and male gang-rape is not uncommon. Into this bleak world Romeo is incarcerated by his parents, and the one light, the one beacon of hope, that he finds there is Juliet. Here is a story of teenage love set against a depressing background in the Verona Institute where power over the inmates appears to be derived from a mixture of medication, and physical and psychological control.
This is where I start to have problems with this story as I found it very difficult to establish many of the principal characters in the traditional story and who some of the new people in this story are, so I really have to step back from my comfort zone and look at the bigger picture here and ask myself, “What if I had never heard of Romeo and Juliet, what if I knew nothing about this story?” This then becomes a completely new work and here I find references to one of my favourite shows/films, Grease and that classic “Tell Me More” scene. There are (for me anyhow) overtones from The Shawshank Redemption here too.
I have to also throw away my thoughts of the choreography for Prokofiev’s ballet and be open to how interpretive Mathew Bourne’s new choreography is to express the often troubled world that the young people of the Verona Institute are living in and we do get a clear idea of the regimental, almost mind-controlled world that they live in and the power that those in authority have and often abuse over them. A bleak institutional tiled wall with only three doors and bleak white institutional costumes for the young people by set and costume designer Lez Brotherston add to those feelings of hopelessness and fear that seem to ooze out of this work. This is a very dark portrayal of this classic love story.
One of the biggest problems that Romeo & Juliet always has, in whatever form it is told, is that by the time the principal performers get the chance to play these iconic roles they are often simply too old to be the star-crossed teenage lovers. Here Matthew Bourne gets around this by only using young dancers from the company and Cordelia Braithwaite as Juliet and Rory Macleod as Romeo make a believable young couple here and both put in fine performances as dancers who capture in movement the joys and sorrows of two people in an ever changing emotional state.
Still though, at the end of this story, Juliet still bothers me a little bit. Are the choices that she makes at the end of this story borne out of true love or guilt? If it is the latter then this story has become something very different from its original source material.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
I have to admit to counting myself as one of those fans and, having reviewed many of his productions over the years, I never tire of how Matthew Bourne always manages to find a completely different angle to tell an often well-known story from and in doing so he often unsettles our deep rooted perceptions of what that story is really about and who its principal characters really are, or really could be.
This production of Romeo + Juliet is however the one that is pushing my limits of how far I want not only one of the most famous stories in the world re-told but how I want Prokofiev’s music, one of the most famous musical scores ever written for ballet, used in a completely different setting.
I am not sure why I have been caught off-guard by this work (which premiered in 2019) as Shakespeare’s story of first love and two tragic young lovers has been re-told, re-invented endlessly in films, television, ballet, theatre, opera, and many other formats. It is a universal story that countless millions of people across their world relate to in their own special way. Likewise, there are different arrangements of Prokofiev’s music for the ballet out there, and in its first performance this ballet even gave this story a new happy ending, one which audiences did not like at all. Even if you are not familiar with the story, the chances are that you will at least know the names of Romeo and Juliet as they are so often used to refer to any two young people in love.
In Matthew Bourne’s new story we are no longer in Verona itself but the Verona Institute, a deliberately vague place that for some reason is where young people are sent to. Is this some sort of prison, a psychiatric hospital, a correctional facility, some sort of social experiment, or a bit of all of these things? We are never told the answer to this question but, whatever it is, Verona is not a place where anyone wants to go of their own free will as it is a brutal place where violence is part of everyday life. Here, in this bleak place we find Juliet who is being sexually abused by one of the guards, and violence between inmates is a part of every-day life and male gang-rape is not uncommon. Into this bleak world Romeo is incarcerated by his parents, and the one light, the one beacon of hope, that he finds there is Juliet. Here is a story of teenage love set against a depressing background in the Verona Institute where power over the inmates appears to be derived from a mixture of medication, and physical and psychological control.
This is where I start to have problems with this story as I found it very difficult to establish many of the principal characters in the traditional story and who some of the new people in this story are, so I really have to step back from my comfort zone and look at the bigger picture here and ask myself, “What if I had never heard of Romeo and Juliet, what if I knew nothing about this story?” This then becomes a completely new work and here I find references to one of my favourite shows/films, Grease and that classic “Tell Me More” scene. There are (for me anyhow) overtones from The Shawshank Redemption here too.
I have to also throw away my thoughts of the choreography for Prokofiev’s ballet and be open to how interpretive Mathew Bourne’s new choreography is to express the often troubled world that the young people of the Verona Institute are living in and we do get a clear idea of the regimental, almost mind-controlled world that they live in and the power that those in authority have and often abuse over them. A bleak institutional tiled wall with only three doors and bleak white institutional costumes for the young people by set and costume designer Lez Brotherston add to those feelings of hopelessness and fear that seem to ooze out of this work. This is a very dark portrayal of this classic love story.
One of the biggest problems that Romeo & Juliet always has, in whatever form it is told, is that by the time the principal performers get the chance to play these iconic roles they are often simply too old to be the star-crossed teenage lovers. Here Matthew Bourne gets around this by only using young dancers from the company and Cordelia Braithwaite as Juliet and Rory Macleod as Romeo make a believable young couple here and both put in fine performances as dancers who capture in movement the joys and sorrows of two people in an ever changing emotional state.
Still though, at the end of this story, Juliet still bothers me a little bit. Are the choices that she makes at the end of this story borne out of true love or guilt? If it is the latter then this story has become something very different from its original source material.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com