Kenneth MacMillan has created many beloved masterpieces, and Romeo and Juliet is a case in point, with its magically arresting themes of young love, the teenage flouting of conservative social values and finally death.
In a strange way, dance compresses the tragedy into an intensity that can both seize the heart and draw out the emotions, unentangled by the demands of complex Shakespearean word play.
Macmillan fills the beautifully designed square in Verona with step dances, carnival dances and personality collisions. The ballet is West Side Story but set during the Renaissance, where Romeo (Chi Cao) and Juliet (Nao Sakuma) dance out their erotic ecstasy in some of MacMillan’s more difficult steps.
Yet, in spite of a scenario bursting at the seams with teenage testosterone and explosive sex, the first hour or so is somehow muted. The harlots show their knickers and Tybalt (Robert Parker) does a bit of rapier rattling, yet it is all very polite.
Thus the venom and high feeling in a volatile crowd, things MacMillan requires, are frequently absent, and the longueurs of so-so acting become theatrically dull (apart from the terrific fencing sequences)
The evening soared, finally, with Marion Tait’s dramatically superb Lady Capulet. Whether moving eerily to Prokofiev’s great ballroom music or giving herself over to monstrous public grief at her kinsman Tybalt’s murder,T ait is truly magnificent. Frankly, it was her fine acting which strengthened much that was otherwise colourless.
Still, Sakuma is a convincing Juliet and her rejection of Paris danced on pointes is not without emotional significance in a restless evening.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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