Music by
Serge Prokofiev
Choreography by
Rudolf Nureyev
Restaging by
Patricia Ruanne and Frederic Jahn
Designed by
Ezio Frigerio
Romeo
Dmitri Gruzdyev
Juliet
Daria Klimentova
Mercutio
Yat-Sen Chang
Rosaline
Elisa Celis
Benvolio
Ivan Dinev
Tybalt
Fabian Reimair
Nurse
Laura Hussey
Paris
Cesar Morales
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Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
English National Ballet
The Coilseum
11 - 15 January 2005
If one felt any temptation to think that Rudolf Nureyev's genius lay in directions other than choreography, this spirited and dramatically rewarding production of 'Romeo and Juliet' should give one serious pause. Some say that the big set pieces, the battles and solos, are brilliantly constructed; but that Nureyev did not achieve real connection between Juliet and Romeo in their pas de deux - that these moments, where the romance exclusively lies, are just pairs of solos roughly stuck together; and that therefore the weight of the story lies oddly away from the principal characters in it.
I disagree. The pas de deux are choreographically highly effective, though it seemed as if the chemistry between Dmitri Gruzdyev as Romeo and Daria Klimentova as Juliet - both very fine dancers, and fine actors with it - was less perfect than it might have been. But there is a reason that such a judgement might be made: it is that Romeo and Juliet are not alone in the foreground of the story.
The truth is that Nureyev, who studied the story carefully and thought about it deeply when choreographing it for this very company, wanted to make a larger statement about the family feud that is the background to, and cause of, the lovers' tragedy. He wanted to bring the fact of it into fuller focus, and to end with reconciliation between the families as the tale's express moral and goal. And this he explicitly and successfully does. There are ways of staging Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' which do this too, and ways of staging it which push the feud and its ending into the lesser light beyond the burning salience of the lovers' feelings and their deaths. For Nureyev, who rethought the story, an insistent fact was that there could be no story without the feud; and so he concluded that the feud has to be put into the foreground and kept there.
He does this with the brilliant fight scene in the first act, which includes the spectacular montage of the opposing forces, swords and hands silhouetted against the backdrop, in a moment of frozen energy. And he does it with the breathtakingly effective combats between Mercutio and Tybalt, and Tybalt and Romeo. One of the high points of this production is Yat-Sen Chang's Mercutio - this wonderful little dancer is a piece of electricity turned into a human being - and in his fight with Tybalt, and in his protracted death, when his friends think he is merely joshing as he clasps his pierced side and staggers from one to the other of them, he displays high talent.
Despite its name, the English National Ballet is stuffed with exceptionally gifted dancers from all round the world, and its productions are invariably staged and designed with beauty, elegance and vividness. This is no exception. It was one of the high points of the year's end 2004.
AC Grayling
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