Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet – Sadler’s Wells, London

Director and Choreographer: Matthew Bourne

Composer: Sergei Prokofiev (arranged by Terry Davies)

Conductor: Daniel Parkinson

Matthew Bourne has taken the template of the Romeo and Juliet story, as told by William Shakespeare, and waved his magic choreographer’s wand over it. The result is a recognisable retelling of the tale, but transformed. This is, if anything, a bleaker vision of young love destroyed.

In this version, Verona is re-imagined as “The Verona Institute”, a nightmare vision of gantry ladders and glazed white brick, with doors labelled ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ like a 1950’s primary school-cum-prison. The young men and women confined there are subject to medical intervention, forced to parade in military formations, and subject to run-of-the-mill brutality by the guards. The most prominent of the guards is this show’s equivalent of Tybalt (Danny Reubens). Also recognisable are Mercutio, his close friend modelled on Benvolio, Juliet and her best friend Frenchie (a differently gendered, altogether more amiable, version of Paris, athletically danced by Anya Ferdinand). There is a lot of contact between the men and women, there is abuse, most affectingly of Juliet by the guards, and into this pressure cooker of an institution is dropped Romeo, a mentally distressed young man.

This setting’s big win for Matthew Bourne is the licence it gives him to alternate between chillingly envisioned militaristic formations and wild, joyful, exuberant outbreaks of free movement. The intensely physical pas-des-deux that show the developing passion of the principals, beautifully danced by Cordelia Braithwaite and Paris Fitzpatrick, is mirrored by the desperate pursuits and evasions of the Act Two curtain, the tragic confrontation of Mercutio, Tybalt, and Romeo.

It all happens on Lez Brotherston’s clinical, hard set, under Paule Constable’s pitiless stark white lighting. In another magisterial display of her skill, Constable makes a shiny metal ceiling-rose and a glitter ball look like fixtures from an operating theatre. Despite a complete absence of colour, the lighting occasionally renders the unforgiving setting quite dulcet, but the design is predominantly cold, harsh and unforgiving. The athletic poise and grace of the dancers become more treasurable, the drive to break free of the institutional constraints placed on them becomes palpable. Tybalt is so wicked that he wears a black undershirt beneath his uniform, and that black element takes the eye forcibly in a sea of stark white.

This is a powerful, affecting, vision of the well-known tragedy. It employs a fantastic ensemble of young dancers and is brilliantly well-served by Terry Davies’ stripped-down orchestration of Prokofiev’s lush score. Lez Brotherston’s set combines hard-edged surfaces with superbly flexible levels and multiple entrances, and the delicacy of the lighting design helps modulate emotional warmth and makes a backlit frosted glass door panel a devastating threat.

Matthew Bourne’s take on classical ballet is always radical, always interesting. Here it is also overwhelmingly successful.

Runs until 2 September 2023