Swan Lake: the one with boys

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake
New Adventures
Sadlers Wells, 21 December 2006

Swanage

This is fun. Great visually (colourful sets, costumes etc), comedy and tragedy in near equal measure, knowing and relevant with sprinklings of satire and spoof. A cracking Christmas production that left me with a threat of a tear in the eye and a whooping audience. This is a long post so scroll through to sections if you can’t be arsed with it all. Hear this though, Swan Lake is on at Sadlers Wells until 21 January so go see it if you can. It’ll warm the cockles and make you forget your New Year gloom. Until he dies at the end, that is. Ooops! Spoiler alert!

What you need to know

Swan Lake is the ballet you’ve heard of even if you’ve never seen it or have any interest whatsoever in dance. Swan Lake means tragic romantic love, tutus, good and evil magic and a lovers’ leap off a cliff at the end. One of the most technically demanding roles for a ballerina she must play both virginal swan maiden, Odette and evil temptress magician’s daughter Odile. The stuff that little girl’s dancing dreams are made of.

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake takes the original Tchaikovsky score, played live in all its orchestral glory, but decimates the old time story to create something relevant, hilarious and gorgeous as well as touchingly tragic too. It sits somewhere between ballet, modern dance, musical theatre and pantomime. What this means is that it’s excellently accessible and suitable for anyone. A particularly good introduction to dance, especially at Christmas.

The story

Single mum, the Queen, has unhappy Princeling to raise in his royal role. L’il Prince is bored rigid by his monotous duties smiling and waving and all attempts to elicit affection from mumsy are rebuked. Cue grown up Prince in much the same situation. Queenie’s Private Secretary introduces a giggly, vapid blonde to the Prince in a bid to cheer him up. She’s a hilarious gawky creation in a pink puffball making social gaffes left, right and centre and the Queen doesn’t hide her absolute disapproval. The Royals tootle off to a theatre performance with the Girlfriend in tow and a wickedly funny spoof of romantic ballet is performed on one side of the stage (mooning fairies, leiderhosen woodcutter and tree demons with bulging genitalia) with the Girlf’s gauche reactions and the Queen’s horrified reponses acted out from a theatre box on the other side.

Prince is depressed and hits the bottle. Queenie walks in on him, disgusted and is then subjected to a fabulously erotic assault upon her by her son, desperate for her love. Gosh.

Getting nowhere he escapes the castle and goes to an excellently seedy nightclub where Tchaikovsky’s rousing music becomes disco dancing, lasciviousness and drunkeness. The character acting is very funny from the stumbling tweedy old lady to the terribly bored Burlesque dancers. The Prince flails around and ends up beaten up on the streets, snapped by the Paparazzi. The Girlfriend is paid off by the Private Secretary to disappear. Prince is suicidal.

Returning to the castle he psychs himself up to chuck himself in the wintry lake when…… a flock of swans descends and transports him with their feral proud beauty and freedom.

A digression

The swans are male. This is a good thing. It’s rare to see male dancers get such beautiful, bestial, athletic yet delicate choreography to work with, especially in a group, and it’s great to see the swan maiden ideal turned on it’s neck with half nekkid males in feathery pants and white paint. Especially good if you’re in the third row with prime view. The men are great and as they dance with the Prince, first attacking and repelling him and then allowing the main swan to accept him and dance ‘a deux’ with him. You see the Prince gaining in confidence and revelling in the freedom suddenly shown him. But it’s impossible not to read a homosexual awakening into it too, although none of the official publicity material will endorse such a reading. Funny, really, when, rightly or wrongly, ballet dancing is so famously associated with homosexuality in men. Consider, it could have been a mixed sex cast of wild swans – no reason why women can’t do this kind of dancing to get across the repression/freedom theme. But, anyway, these swans are great and it gets better…

Plot continued, second half

Post swan revelation a ball is the offing at the Palace to find the Prince a wife. This is Queenie’s ball. It’s dark and sensuous and she looks incredible in a red pouffy evening gown. All sorts of sleazy European royals turn up (as well as the hopeful Girlfriend tart with a heart) and there’s the whole red carpet, Paparazzi and anorak fans at the front door. Queenie flirts with everyone and as all get drunken there’s sexy groping and seduction all over the shop. Prince is subdued and finds it rather distateful. Then a dark stranger enters bearing a striking similarity to the swan man except he’s wearing black, leather trousers and is a right slut. He charms and sleazes over everyone in a fantastically dishy way even wooing the Queen and sexily licking her arm. Prince goes bonkers, brandishes a pistol and ends up getting his silly Girlfriend shot.

Here it gets messy. Prince is sedated in a sinister sectioning moment. He descends into a fantasy world as the swans invade his bedroom and dance an aggresive, nightmarish scene ending with the main swan being pecked to death for defending the Prince.

Morning comes. Queenie finds Princeling dead in bed. Too late she grasps him in her mother’s arms. The white swan appears at the window cradling the Prince. Dramatic fin.

What I think

It’s beyond criticism really. This is popular entertainment done well. The only problem I have with the show is that the role of Prince is a difficult to pull off. He’s a tragic victim, repressed and desperate; a really unfortunate character who never catches a break. The true star is the Queen, danced this night by Saranne Curtin. She was brilliant. A fine actress and character dancer she did the swing from haughty to sexy with the arch of an eyebrow and a coquettish look. Stunning, too, in the gorgeous dresses. Just brilliant. Ah, fuck it. Just enjoy it.

Take: absolutely anyone really. Kids, grandparents, annoying aunties, football fans, vicars, luvvies, train drivers, anyone. Except, possibly, purist balletomanes who can get a bit upset by this kind of ‘dumbing down’ or subversion. The sillies.

Links to reviews on Londondance.com 

Don’t dance with scissors

Edward Scissorhands
New Adventures
Sadlers Wells, 3 February 2006

Edward Scissorhands is a tragic fairy tale with a human heart, the story of the unwitting outcast, “an uncommonly gentle man”, ripe for the big stage Bourne makeover. This is explicitly a stage adaptation of the film (it isn’t billed as a ballet) and despite a few slightly odd tweaks to the story, it is faithful to its origin, particularly with Lez Brotherston’s stunning set and the magical movie musical score of Danny Elfman via Terry Davis which weaves the Burtonesque gauze around the production.

But despite the hype, Bourne doesn’t push the dimensions of the narrative to its gothic or magical extremes in his choreographic adaptation. New Adventures is company full of consummate character actors, and the inhabitants of Hope Springs are sharply and comically observed, but it’s a “Desperate Housewives” style suburbia of tame types, complete with an oversexed and underdressed Edie Britt, rather than the more sinister, ultra conservative, slightly loopy and closed off small town community of the film. In this version, the religious Evercreeches appear more freakish and marginalised than the graceful, benign Edward. In fact, there is very little sense of community reaction to the arrival of Edward and his monstrous deformity. They’re straight in there with a poolside barbecue welcome party, practically ignoring him as he hovers on their outskirts, bemusedly twiddling his blades, until they realize he can jazz up their hedges and hairstyles and then there’s plenty of visual fun to be had with his novel artistry.

The scissor hands, a genius of costuming, were underplayed, limited to performing cunning topiary rather than fundamentally choreographed in. They only truly came into play in the duet between Edward & Kim at the closing stages of the piece when we caught a glimpse of inspired originality, the scissors wrapping gently around Kim’s body, suddenly as sensitive and safe as loving fingers.

Bourne claims that you can do a close up on stage but in the second circle at Sadlers Wells you need opera glasses to get intimate with Edward’s fear, loneliness and longing. The enduring images of the film are those shots of Johnny Depp, gazing mournfully, looking so tragic, haunted and alone… the evidence of his ultimate humanity in the face of the freakish, shallow suburbanites around him. The choreography isn’t ingenious enough here to replace cinematography as the tool for conveying the emotional core of the story and at times Bourne opts for bolstering up the comedy elements rather than tackling the tragedy at the centre of this fable.

There are big dance numbers to console us; the outdoor party jigging and jiving, the romantic snowy ice duet, the clever dream-sequence topiary ballet and the festive, fizzing swing dance climax. But is Bourne unwittingly recycling shades of past productions? Ensemble character pieces are starting to feel formulaic. If it weren’t for the magnificent score and set and committed performances from the company I’d have felt rather cheated.

So hot on the heels of “Play without Words”, is this “Musical without Songs”? There were certainly clear nods to some musical greats including West Side Story & Grease for starters. A few songs would have helped chip the story along. But this is Bourne style dance theatre and all credit to the cast and crew for producing a show that hundreds of people have seen at Sadlers over Christmas and the New Year, the vast majority of which have been totally thrilled and thoroughly entertained and maybe, let’s hope, encouraged to see more dance in the future.