Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake at Sadler’s Wells review: the gold standard for reimagining a classic

It’s a justly iconic image. The Swan stands centre stage: bare-chested, shaggy-legged, powerful arms twisting up and eyes glaring beneath a crest of black make-up. You shiver. He’s coming for you.

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake turns 30 next year. Its 1995 premiere laid the foundation for Bourne’s company New Adventures, creating shows that make audiences into devoted fans. Although often misdescribed as the all-male Swan Lake – around the boy swans is a cadre of characterful women – this show is properly gay, powerfully erotic and romantic.

Bourne was cheeky – tweaking royal shenanigans and deferential post-war Britain – and dizzyingly imaginative, refashioning the ballet’s lady swans into a pack of feral masculinity. His Prince encounters an untamed creature and then a danger-stranger until despair sends him over the edge.

This revival, with young dancers who hadn’t even hatched when the piece premiered, feels supremely alive. Perhaps because it centres on loneliness, never out of fashion.

James Lovell’s Prince, anxious eyes peering from a pale, beaky face, doesn’t suit his unyielding royal world. He almost has to rugby tackle the permafrost-parenting Queen (incisive Nicole Kabera) to get a hug. Left to his own devices, Lovell moves in lonesome curves, but his dutiful public life is framed by decisive straight lines. He’s literally out of step.

James Lovell (The Prince) and Harrison Dowzell (The Swan). (Johan Persson)

Lost to himself and sloshed in his longjohns, he’s reclaimed at the lake when the swans appear. They unleash a fierce physical expression he craves: wheeling arms, lurching leaps, hands that frame their face like a caress. They beckon but bristle. Sweat sheening their starlit, white-powdered skin (beautiful lighting by Paule Constable), the terrific dancers perform what seems super-sexy martial arts.

The Swan himself is a magnetic Harrison Dowzell. Prince and Swan dance with cartwheeling exuberance and inter-species electricity. An evil magician menaces the original ballet; here, transgressive desire is enough to taint a romantic awakening.

A bloodlust tang runs through the dances at the palace party, as Dowzell’s lairy Stranger leads lascivious power moves and sparks the Queen’s vulpine smirk. For the Prince, it’s a Freudian nightmare: your mum necking with your crush. Lovell and Dowzell’s hallucinatory duet signals alarm and allure in equal measure.

This is a peerless piece of storytelling – not a scrap of filler. Your eyes dart all over, because everyone’s interesting – from a palace flunky on corgi duty to a bleary fan-dancer going through the motions, or Katrina Lyndon, superb as the Prince’s wannabe girlfriend. Lyndon draws a character arc in the key of gauche, rich in giggles and disappointment.

Tchaikovsky’s magnificent score is played live, crisp and soulful, and the tragic ending is scintillating and bereft. Thirty years on, Bourne’s Swan Lake is no longer ballet’s scrappy little nobody – rather, it’s the gold standard for reimagining a classic.

Sadler’s Wells, to Jan 26; sadlerswells.com