30 years on, its erotic impact is undiminished. In 1995 Matthew Bourne took a traditional ballet and its classical score and made it contemporary. Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is a landmark in English ballet.
His radical reinvention went on to be the longest running full-length ballet of all time and having the sort of success, world-wide, which is usually reserved for big Broadway musicals. The show changed perceptions about ballet and inspired many young men to be dancers and many of them are now in Bourne’s New Adventures company.
The young Prince in this version is in the middle of an unhappy affair with a vulgar and totally unsuitable girl. He also has Oedipal feelings for his mother, but she, openly flirting with her equerries, has no time for him and his problems.
The Prince goes to a dive in Soho, gets drunk, gets chucked out, gets photographed by the tabloid press, and ends up contemplating suicide in Green Park. He is stopped in his tracks by a flock of swans and one swan in particular who cradles him in his arms and gives him the affection he has longed for.
Bourne’s major innovation, and it caused a sensation back in the nineties, was that all the swans were male swans. The dancers have bare chests, bare feet, bare calves, feathered legs. They are not emasculated; they are fiercely physical. They are wonderful, beautiful, sensual birds with enormous wing power and energy. The choreography emphasises their violent nature.
The Black Swan has been transformed into a male Stranger and rough trade. He dances with the Price, who is totally bewildered because The Stranger looks so like the White Swan of his dreams and yet so obviously isn’t. Shocked by the discovery of his true sexuality, the Prince goes mad.
Whilst hospitalised in the palace, he and the White Swan are pecked to death by a flock of swans who appear from under, over and through his bed, some leaping on to it. It is a great, thrilling finale with constant exits and immediate re-entrances, heightening the dramatic excitement.
There are excellent performances by Harrison Dowzell and James Lovell. Dowzell, immensely impressive, has the Swan’s and the Stranger’s magnetism. Lovell has the Prince’s vulnerability. Nicole Kabera is his unlovable mother.
Swan Lake is the most popular ballet in the world, its popularity due to Tchaikovsky’s bitter-sweet music. Much of the pleasure comes from watching Bourne’s varied and unpredictable responses, comic and serious, to a very familiar score. Bourne’s Swan Lake is strongly recommended.
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