Heartstopper may have returned to insist that young love can thrive. But the original teenaged love story is doomy as they come – Romeo and Juliet propels its star-crossed lovers to their deaths. Matthew Bourne’s stark 2019 dance version is set in a harsh correctional facility called the Verona Institute, where young people get the hope squeezed out of them. It’s a horribly effective frame for the old story.
In this chilly white-tiled clinic, designed for surveillance, exercise, everything is regimented. Thuggish guard Tybalt (Danny Reubens), a bully and rapist, treats Juliet (Cordelia Braithwaite) as his doll. Their scenes are genuinely distressing, as he clasps her by the neck and drags her behind locked doors.
Prokofiev’s heartsick score, played live with tremendous verve, here kicks off with the bloodcurdling Dance of the Knights (there’s a reason it’s The Apprentice’s foreboding theme tune). Here, it introduces the youthful inmates, shows them restricted but resisting. They march onto the stage with stiff arms, bunched fists, grabbing at air and falling to their knees. You sense them crying out at every attempt to pummel them into uniformity.
New to Verona is Romeo (Paris Fitzpatrick): a bit bored, a bit unruly. He’s not sick, he’s just a teenager. Yet his frosty politician parents would rather shut him away than offer a cuddle. He’s callow – while Juliet has experience that she’d rather be without.
A terrific, detailed ensemble includes Daisy May Kemp’s earnest pastor and an incandescent Ben Brown, leading a trio of cheeky boys who befriend Romeo. The urgent first half is one of Bourne’s best sweeps of dance-drama. The kids register jolts of impotent anger, tiny fractures of dissent (even if only a shared look or sarcastic stomp) and little nicks of individuality.
Braithwaite, the first night Juliet, is an expressive dancer with a long face made for woe. She and Romeo clock each other when he arrives, then meet at an awkward institute social. Their swooning twirls and clever footwork are immediately in synch. Late at night they dodge the guards’ flashlights for an exuberant encounter, joined at the lips and truly dancing like no one’s watching – a rarity in this world. All the kids unite to celebrate their love (Paule Constable’s lighting briefly transforms the clinic into a romantic sanctuary) – rapture cut terribly short when Tybalt, drunk and dangerous, blunders in.
The second half barrels downhill to tragedy – but leans so hard on this trajectory that it flattens out the story. The medicated inmates lose their individuality, melodrama douses the lovers’ pained realism. Even so, Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet harnesses youthful ardour in a goosebumping night of dance.
