Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet review: A spiky and youthful Shakespeare reimagining
Dance adaptation of the classic tragedy is staged at Sadler’s Wells in London
Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet pits young people against a harsh adult world. This updated dance version shows giddy first love, blooming like a dandelion forcing itself through concrete.
A brilliant dance storyteller, Bourne is known for his social precision. He has a sharp eye for period, for fashion, for how people behave within a society. For this show, created in 2019 with emerging dancers and young co-creatives, he stripped most of that away. Shakespeare’s warring families are out: instead, young people are held in the chilly Verona Institute, an abstract school-prison-laboratory, regulated by oppressive or ineffectual adults.
We get a glimpse of the outside world when Romeo arrives, dumped in the facility by his awful politician parents. Their son is a problem because he has no facade, no public polish. Paris Fitzpatrick’s geeky Romeo is packed with nervous energy, limbs self-consciously gangling.
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