Gut-wrenching, visceral, all-consuming—nothing packs a punch like young love. In the U.K. revival of Matthew Bourne’s 2019 Romeo and Juliet, now on at Sadler’s Wells through September 2, the choreographer suggests that Shakespeare’s star-crossed teens may actually be mentally unbalanced. So instead of working within the usual paradigm of violent pride, patriarchy, and fate, he transports us to the highly policed and overmedicating Verona Institute, a place for troubled youth. Frankly, it’s surprising it took so long for someone to make this leap. But then, ever since he wowed the world with his all-male Swan Lake of 1995, Bourne and his genre-bending company, New Adventures, have made it their mission to reimagine overworked ballets in fresh ways.
With no dynastic family feuds to navigate, this Romeo and Juliet interrogates mental illness and its attendant tragedies. Bourne deftly upends and re-arranges the characters and plot for this purpose. Tybalt is still the primary antagonist but is now a brutal orderly. Mercutio and Balthasar are an incarcerated gay couple, and Friar Laurence is reincarnated as the resident female chaplain, among other revisions. Romeo is a twitchy A.D.H.D. type who’s been dumped at the institute by his politician parents. Juliet is an abused victim of the system, in the clutches of the monstrous Tybalt. A shocking new ending is perhaps the most radical departure from the familiar versions. Add in Terry Davies’s jolting, almost atonal adaptation of Sergei Prokofiev’s original score and Lez Brotherston’s glossy, white-tiled set—clinical and oppressive—and you feel you’re seeing Romeo and Julietfor the first time.
