With its 537th performance by the Royal Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan’s sumptuous Romeo and Juliet is back for its 60th anniversary season. Not much has changed since its premiere in 1965, with a 45-year-old Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, nearly 20 years her junior, as the star cross’d lovers.
Nicholas Georgiadis’s imposing designs, slightly revised in the 2000s, still move the action swiftly from a dusty Veronese square to the bedroom to the tomb – the costumes in dusty oranges, yellows, plum reds providing grandeur and vivid life. And the Royal Ballet company still absolutely understands the work’s heady mix of impassioned naturalism and soaring classicism. Each detail is considered and performed with infinite care to Prokofiev’s racing score.
Reaction emerges from action. When Matthew Ball’s Romeo first encounters Juliet (Yasmine Naghdi) at a ball, where she is supposed to be dancing with someone else, their entranced duet stops the other guests in their tracks. Each face registers shock; each member of the crowd has a view on what’s happening. Equally, Joseph Sissens’s Mercutio and Leo Dixon’s Benvolio aren’t stock figures. They are utterly convincing as lads about town and as Romeo’s mates, expressing their relationship not in looks and slaps on the shoulder but through dancing that’s at once technically sharp and dramatically shaded. Ryoichi Hirano’s Tybalt isn’t a generic bruiser but a frustrated, furious man, desperate to assert himself.
It is all beautifully drawn, nothing wasted or lazy. Little grace notes are paid due heed. There’s a marvellous moment at the start of Act 2 when Romeo dances in a circle, jumping lightly, flicking his hands with the pleasure of being alive. Ball makes it count; he’s a dancer in his prime, taking the balcony scene in great arcs of exuberance, registering every note of Romeo’s exhilaration, disillusion and eventual despair.
His understanding with Naghdi (they’ve been dancing together since their school days) reveals itself in duets of sculpted loveliness. She dances beautifully, and acts with deep intelligence, charting Juliet’s journey from silly, flirtatious girl to doomed heroine. Yet there’s a flicker between Naghdi’s thought and her movement; she never quite abandons herself in the way her partner does.
Over at Sadler’s Wells, Wayne McGregor, the Royal Ballet’s current resident choreographer, has unveiled Deepstaria, his latest work for his own Company Wayne McGregor. It’s a glorious piece, named after a rare jellyfish and danced in a set coated in Vantablack– a synthetic material that absorbs light – yet carved by Theresa Baumgartner’s lighting design into dazzling channels of expressionistic black and white or turquoise depths.
The subtle richness of the changing colours is as surprising as the darkness, or the odd notes in the recorded score, created by music producer Lexx and sound designer Nicolas Becker to mimic music played live. Yet the technology exists to showcase the nine remarkable dancers moving across a reflective floor.
McGregor’s choreography is densely varied, from a solo under dappled light to a long and sinuous duet for two men, to hands wafting like anemones and sea urchins. The dancers might be sinking in the deep or floating in space; their diaphanous forms constantly morph and beckon, pictures of light against the darkness, full of life and love.
Star ratings (out of five)
Romeo and Juliet ★★★★
Deepstaria ★★★★
• Romeo and Juliet is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 26 May
