Right to surprise I went to this production to some extent in order to challenge myself: I don’t know ballet and I don’t understand it, especially modern ballet. But the familiar and beloved story about the Verona lovers from childhood should have become the semantic framework on which my understanding would be based. Well, that's exactly what happened. Moreover, with the plot of Shakespeare, the director treated much more freely than with the music of Prokofiev.
The stage is laconic, but multifunctional scenery, above which hangs the sullen sign “Verona Institute” (not a trace of the romantic image of the Italian city). This is not a closed school, not a correctional institution, or even a hospital. There is an atmosphere of ban on everything, and love in the first place. The plot of Shakespeare's play is greatly simplified, of those heroes whom we can identify, here in addition to the couple in love, we will meet only Tybald (the overseer) and Mercutio (the resident of the Institute). Both of these images are solved in a vivid characteristic manner, and also played by incredibly charismatic actors Dan Wright and Ben Brown.
Here it is necessary to focus on the fact that the actors – and these two, and the performers of the two main parts Paris Fitzpatrick and Cordelia Bracewaite, and in general all – play in full force not only as ballet artists, but also as dramatic. It's very expressive, powerful and bright. The line between ballet and drama has never been crossed. This is the peculiarity and strength of the syncretic statement that Matthew Born presented in this play.
A separate line of "Romeo and Juliet" is the modern social and artistic context, which clearly manifests itself from the scenery - the Verona Institute institution becomes not only a symbol of the social system that deprives a person of his elementary rights - to freedom, to personality, to love. But it is also an expressive intertextual reference to a huge layer of works, and above all to the painting by Milos Forman “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975). In addition, there is an explicit reference to Darren Arofonski's "Black Swan" (2010) with his psychedelic finale decision. The performance is generally filled with many reminiscences, including (whatever a pun it may look like) on William our Shakespeare. Although, perhaps, this was not listed among the director's ideas, but became an accidental hit, reflecting a certain pattern. We are talking, of course, about the names of the performers of Romeo and Juliet: it is perhaps difficult in the modern world to find more Shakespearean names than Paris and Cordelia. And another paradox of any production of the play after 1968 is that it enters into a special interaction not only with the work of Shakespeare, but with the film of Franco Zeffirelli. Which is exactly what happens with Matthew Bourne's ballet.
Contemporary discourse is read in Tibald’s tattoos, in various manifestations of forbidden love, and in the appearance of a female priest instead of Lorenzo’s brother. But no matter how much we try to modernize and actualize this story, the most important thing in it is the love that, like the sea, becomes more the more you take from it. And although there is nothing more banal than a story about the love of a young man and a girl, something Shakespeare knew about her, that a thousand years later, and in an unrecognizable entourage, eternal lovers from Verona will excite our imagination and surprise. Again. That’s why they’re eternal, maybe...