Romeo and Juliet, Sadler’s Wells, review: Matthew Bourne switches up familiar story with unpredictable production

Matthew Bourne loves a familiar title, but he also loves switching it up. His new Romeo and Juliet throws out some of the best-known features of Shakespeare’s play – no feuding families, no potions. His gift for storytelling drives it onwards, from giddy love-scenes to chilling violence.

This opening night had its own dramas. Reece Causton, the first cast Mercutio, was injured early in the show, which was stopped to allow Ben Brown to step in for an exhilarating performance. The swift fix highlights the theatre sense of Bourne’s New Adventures company, and the way this touring production is set up. There are not just different casts but two alternating companies – each joined, at every venue, by six young local dancers. It builds on Bourne’s interest in nurturing young talent, and highlights the production’s emphasis on youth.

Bourne made his name with the celebrated 1995 Swan Lake with male swans, pulling a fairytale ballet into a present-day world. Where many Romeo retellings emphasise contemporary divisions, Bourne reframes it as a story of young people against a uniformly oppressive system.

The Verona Institute is a school, reformatory, perhaps mental hospital – the kind of chilly institution that has always been a favourite Bourne trope. The ever brilliant Lez Brotherston designs a clinical set; white tile with stairs swooping down from a gantry, atmospherically lit by Paule Constable. Paris Fitzpatrick’s Romeo is a twitchy youth who embarrasses his sleek politician parents, who can’t wait to park him out of sight. Everybody else is an inmate.

Dan Wright’s imposing guard Tybalt presides over the young people, a constant threat. In the production’s worst and most avoidable misstep, he also rapes Cordelia Braithwaite’s Juliet. Dance is far too ready to use sexual violence as a shorthand and a default. It’s there for Tybalt’s characterisation, but Bourne does shockingly little to make it part of Juliet’s.

Braithwaite and Fitzpatrick make an ardent, vulnerable pair, a mix of headlong wonder and goofy shyness. The ballroom scene becomes an institute dance, with the inmates going from stiff embarrassment under adult supervision to hormone-fuelled excitement as soon as they’re alone.

It’s Tybalt who turns the story to violence, attacking his charges until they turn on him. Bourne’s fight and death scenes are fast-paced and genuinely frightening, emotions spilling over into brutal and panicky body language.

It’s all heightened by the pace and unpredictability of the storytelling, and by Terry Davies’s new version of the Prokofiev score. Cut, reorchestrated and substantially reordered, it’s all sharp textures and chamber intensity, underpinning the freshness and momentum of a taut, urgent show.

Until 31 August, then touring. Box office 020 7863 8000