Gender Bender Bourne Challenges The Bard

He’s back: Britain’s most decorated choreographer with a raw production of Mr Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, brilliant as much as it is occasionally confusing.

Over the years the warring Montague and Capulet families have made disguised appearances as Jets and Sharks in Bernstein’s West Side story; they’ve turned up as Mob families and even in a production challenging the tensions of bilingual Canada.

However, last night – although not quite as uniquely distinct as they have been in earlier productions - the families were playing out their traditional rivalries in something akin to one of Orwell’s dystopian backdrops: the Verona Institute.

The only thing missing were straight jackets – although I’m sure Romeo turned up in one of those at some point – but in were the warders, sedatives, white uniforms, punishment batons and hand-held search lights.

Borstal for naughty boys and girls? Prison? School? or a social experiment featuring brutal tactics?

You decide says Sir Matthew and just, for good measure, he’s made Friar Laurence the kindly Rev Bernadette ‘Bernie’ Laurence – Institute chaplain – Juliet’s suitor in the play, Paris, switches sex to become her devoted friend Frenchie and Romeo’s friendship circle is boosted by Balthasar, Mercutio’s boyfriend. Confused? You will be. Challenged? Most certainly!

Yes, it is a brave production interwoven with numerous themes and certainly does not shy away from tackling issues normally the preserve of movies or tv scripts: mental health, knife crime, physical abuse, homophobic bullying and bigotry.

The heat is certainly on in a theatre where the air conditioning usually winds up by the end of Act I and freezes everyone to death in Act II. Last night it didn’t!

Everyone was on the edge of their seats for Bourne’s scintillating choreography and the passionate, thrilling duo of Monique Jonas as Juliet and Rory Macleod as her teenage lover. As well as being wonderful dancers they must surely now hold the record for the longest stage kiss!

But, as Bourne, attests, the moment to which I refer was there to not only capture the intensity of the love between R+J, but that instantaneous moment felt by anyone who’s been in love: the first kiss.

This was a dynamic production, powerful, brimming with energy and propelled forward by Terry Davies’ specially commissioned re-working of Prokofiev’s score for a smaller 15-piece chamber orchestra: I’ll be damned if I could not hear phrases from Bernstein’s West Side Story! Loved it.

This perennial tale of forbidden love, is full of passion and youthful vitality but does not shy away from the rawness of its brutal ending: two teenagers laying on a mortuary slab like pieces of meat….and all because of a fight between two warring families that no one can even remember.

A masterful, vibrant re-telling of Shakespeare’s ageless work.