The choreographer Matthew Bourne tends to be seen as a family favourite – someone who makes works that everyone can enjoy. That’s true, but what gets missed in that judgment is just how good he is at putting passion – suppressed and expressed – on stage.
His Romeo + Juliet, returning four years after its premiere, is a case in point. Set in the Verona Institute, some kind of asylum-cum-borstal designed to incarcerate problem youths, it’s designed by Lez Brotherston as a white world of smooth surfaces, barred doors and staircases that lead nowhere. Yet within this setting, the white-clad characters strive all the time to break from the uniformity imposed on them, introducing a jerk of the head, a twitch of the arms, into their mechanical marches, stretching their limbs into embraces that are forbidden, snatching a kiss under the fierce eye of the guards.
