Matthew Bourne's Romeo And Juliet (2019) -
As much as I enjoyed Matthew Bourne's take on 'The Nutcracker' (2003ish) I immediately found this interpretation of Shakespeare's most well known story very hard to get in to, for it's different setting and for the lack of clarity as to who was playing whom and what their connections were. And as 'The Nutcracker' used a similar institutional set it didn't really show any originality in Matthew's interpretation.
As with a previous version* of this story, also told to Prokofiev's music, I found the dances too modern and too odd to get along with. Neither the movement nor the music seemed to be telling any story and it was unclear where the Bard's romantic tragedy fit within it all.
The actor playing Tybalt (Dan Wright) was nice to look at, but I couldn't understand why his character appeared to be forcing his cousin Juliet (Cordelia Braithwaite) to have sex with him? It might have worked better if the warden character had been the Prince of Verona from the original story instead, in the same way that Baz Luhrmann had turned him in to a police Captain with his version. Tybalt could then have been one of the other inmates along with the rest of the characters.
It was all very frantic and I'm sorry to say that Prokofiev's music didn't help. Maybe Mr Bourne just wasn't using it properly, but I certainly couldn't follow what was supposed to be going on based on any well timed crescendos or lulls in the melody.
When Romeo (Paris Fitzpatrick) appeared on stage and started jerking all around in a very strange dance style, akin to that of Fat Boy Slim's 'Praise You' video, I just thought that it was too weird to stick with and I had to knock it on the head. Life's too short to watch bad theatre.
Unscored as unfinished
*Romeo And Juliet: Beyond Words (2019)