Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet review: A spiky and youthful Shakespeare reimagining

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.

Already an inmate, Juliet is being abused by prison guard Tybalt. Bourne uses this plotline to reshape the tragedy, so that Juliet’s trauma becomes self-destructive. It’s a powerful final twist, but comes at the expense of flattening her early characterisation. Though Cordelia Braithwaite is an ardent Juliet, she’s framed as a victim from the start.

Braithwaite takes flight when she and Romeo meet. The ball scene becomes an institute dance for the young people: a clockwork formal, where everybody dances with stiff, self-conscious limbs. It’s artificial enough that Romeo and Juliet are literally dancing together before they really see each other, whirling into sudden, spontaneous movement.

There’s a headlong quality to their duets. Having started to kiss, they literally don’t stop – keeping lips locked as they dip and turn and roll around the stage. Braithwaite and Fitzpatrick fly up and down the steps and ladders of Lez Brotherston’s white-tiled set, oblivious to drops. But gravity is waiting for them. The same heights become perilous when Danny Reubens’ brutal Tybalt attacks Ben Brown’s larky Mercutio, dangling him over railings.

Throughout, Bourne uses larger groups to amplify his characters’ emotions. The young cast surge through regimented numbers, finding rebellion in the way they lick an envelope or move a chair. When they break out of the routines, there’s a seething collective force to the dancing, all hormones and fury.

Conducted by Daniel Parkinson, Terry Davies’ spiky arrangement of the Prokofiev score underlines its bite. It’s a production that emphasises youthful energy, then sets it bouncing off prison walls.