Composer: Sergei Prokofiev
Director: Christopher Gable
Choreographer: Massimo Moricone
Conductor: Daniel Parkinson
Northern Ballet’s sublime Romeo & Juliet, directed by Christopher Gable and choreographed by Massimo Moricone, first premiered in 1992. The production was forced into retirement in 2015 when floods destroyed sets and costumes. Both have been loving restored for this gloriously fresh revival, playing at Sadler’s Wells before touring.
Visually, it’s stunning. Great slabs of monumental stone create the palazzo of the Capulets. Juliet’s balcony rests on a huge plinth that reminds us of the bier on which she will, all too soon, be laid out in death. Dramatic lighting turns the stage into the gloomy interior of an Italian church – there’s no airy morning scene of Friar Lawrence gathering herbs.
Prokofiev’s chosen libretto pares down Shakespeare’s play to its most vivid outlines but includes a couple of charming scenes in which youthful performers, including tiny children from the London Vocational Ballet School, perform joyful dances to celebrate the festivities with which the ballet opens. It’s part of the way Prokofiev presents us with the sheer youthfulness of the main story. Although the ballet’s most memorable music is probably the ominous Dance of the Knights (famously borrowed as the theme tune of The Apprentice), much of the music in the early scenes is exuberantly playful.
Senior Capulets are dressed in sumptuous velvet robes of scarlet, black and gold, Lady Capulet (Harriet Marden) a chilly, august figure with a huge, somehow threatening, snood. When the male Capulets perform their strutting dances, armed with red spears, it is as if a painting by Uccello comes to life. In his brief appearance, the Prince wears the distinctive cap of a Venetian doge. Mercutio (a lively performance by Aaron Kok) alone wears a jester’s striped leggings. In contrast, Juliet (Dominique Larose) wears the most simple of white slips, her Romeo (Joseph Taylor) in elegantly plain attire.
Their performance of the star-crossed lovers is simply mesmerising. Taylor’s Romeo is both a commanding figure, but one who softens with the ache of new love. Larose’s Juliet begins as a mischievous child, forever teasing the Nurse (a superb comic performance by Heather Lehan) and later spikily furious when thwarted by her parents, comically stubborn towards her unwanted suitor, Paris. But on being approached by Romeo at her parents’ feast, she subtly conveys Juliet’s gradual awakening to love. But most magical is her performance after the couple’s single night together, her tremulous excitement transformed into languorous sensuality.
RSC director, Greg Doran, worked with the dancers for this production, reading them extracts from Shakespeare’s play to inform their performances. You catch little glimpses of sensitive interpretations of the text – the loaded banter of the Montague servants about taking ‘maidenheads’ appearing in the occasional lunge by a male dancer towards an unwilling young woman. The scene in which the nurse broadly hints to Juliet about sexual pleasures to come finds its way into the nurse’s comic gestures here.
Northern Ballet Sinfonia, under the conductorship of Daniel Parkinson, leans into the strikingly modern discordances of Prokofiev’s score, making the sweetness of flute and other woodwind instruments all the more evocative. The brass and percussion sections are also particularly strong. It’s all the more tragic to learn that there is a plan to replace the Sinfonia with a recording for future performances
It’s a gorgeous show, a lovely introduction to the Romeo and Juliet story for those who don’t yet know it, a fresh and moving production for all those who do.
Runs until 1 June 2024
