Hankies at the ready for an emotional rollercoaster with occasions for laughter amongst the tears… Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is becoming as immortal as Tchaikovsky’s powerful music of suppressed desires—played live tonight by the New Adventures Orchestra. Psychologically astute, it touches the heart deeply with its many-layered inspirations. And it is as fresh as it was almost thirty years ago. Better even… with a heart-in-mouth climax.
Bourne cleverly intersperses the familiar drama with humorous pastiche scenes. Gives the heart a break with satire and laughter: at the Pavlova-style ballet, the Queen and the embarrassing commoner Girlfriend in the Royal Box; in the suffocating Royal household where the Prince’s valets and maids prostrate their bodies as stairways for him to descend from his high bed. In the sleazy Swank club, where the Prince is set up for the paparazzi by the Queen’s Private Secretary, underworld and royalty hand in glove.
And Bourne got a gong—our Royal family can take a joke at their expense, I see. No publicity is bad publicity. The Queen, who has no time for her effete son, though likes a bit of male flesh, is very entitled. Her opening events, pulling at red ropes, more crowns on red banners, more accolades for merely being a figurehead—it could all go to your head…
But the Prince, starved of love, going mad with loneliness, contemplating suicide at the lakeside, falls for a White Swan. What a strange thing to do. Freudian, no doubt, or a metaphor: flight if you can’t fight, or crossbreed love standing in for same-sex love, perhaps. In the end, feral hissing male swans turn on the Swan en masse, slashing and biting him to death, as he tries to protect the Prince. True love. The Prince dies and the Queen finally drops her mask. The apotheosis is wonderful, the Prince in the Swan’s arms above the bed frame, together at last. Hankies out… But I am racing ahead…
Scroll back: the promiscuous, taunting Black Swan now called the Stranger, who turns up, armed with a dominant male whip, at the Queen’s reception ball for European dignitaries (sexy dance replaces national dance), drives the fragile Prince over the edge. Especially when he sees his mother taking the Stranger as her latest conquest… He shoots at him, but the sinister Private Secretary returns fire and kills the Girlfriend, who is trying to protect him. That’s her out of the way and the Prince in an asylum, two birds with one stone.
The actor dancers, some ballet trained, some from performance schools, are cast well. James Lovell so poignant as the gentle Prince, usually a secondary role to the Swan, is surely equal casting to Harrison Dowzell’s demanding macho Swan / Stranger roles. Their duets tender, the Prince wrapping his body round the Swan’s, safe in his arms, or rather protecting wings. Both dancers show genuine rapport.
Nicole Kabera as the Queen blowing hot and cold has regal presence in public, haughtily tolerating the jumped-up Girlfriend (Bryony Wood tonight—I am at the second press night and there are many casts on offer throughout the run), flaunting her dubious rights in private. Cameron Flynn is the rigid Private Secretary—you’d think he was appointed by the secret services.
An ensemble of twenty-one plays many parts: maids, valets, nurses, Soho girls, bored fan dancer with fag in her mouth, press photographers, and there has to be an autograph hunter (Bourne was famously one himself in his youth), the foreign princesses and their escorts in sexy black and the fourteen swans and cygnets. How Bourne marshals them and blocks the moves, when the stage is at times split into several events happening at the same time, is remarkable.
Cinematic split screens in essence. That black and white (as is the Prince’s bedroom) mental sanatorium set—door with no handle, unreachable barred window—where the Prince is treated is pure Powell and Pressburger dream sequence. It’s a prison, no different from his life in the stultifying palace. Makes you think of Princess Diana.
Bourne, known for his love of cinema from an early age, uses that knowledge to stunning effect with Lez Brotherston’s set and costumes. Duncan McLean’s video and animated projections (flying swans) add another layer, as does Paule Constables’s lighting. The whole is as near perfection as you can get. It is difficult to know where to rest one’s restless eyes.
Bourne’s storytelling, honed over the years, is inspired and inspiring. In 1995, when Bourne’s then radically new Swan Lake burst on the scene, it was initially considered a bit risqué. Almost thirty years later, school groups fill the back stalls. The fledgling Next Generation are seeing it with fresh eyes, and Bourne as always has tinkered with it and kept it fresh for the loyal oldies with a new cohort of up and coming dancers, with a few going back to the last time (2019) it was here at Sadler’s Wells, namely Kabera as the icy Queen.
A thread that keeps it in the New Adventures family… More than that, he has set up pathways for young dancers to develop with his Cygnet and Swan Schools. Who knew way back, when I was still doing a dance and drama course and he was creating Highland Fling (the first Bourne I fell for), that he would be such a global phenomenon. I wonder where he keeps his fifty-plus awards…
Reviewer: Vera Liber